Enlarge a 72dpi(low-res) Picture

How to enlarge a low resolution picture without losing sharpness and getting "jaggies".

Suppose you have a pic like the poor quality pic of this little boy and you need to see a bit more detail on his face. You don't need to enlarge it very much without it loses all definition. See 2, below.

However there is an easy way to solve this. Open Image/ImageSize and with "contrain Proportions" selected; choose Document Size/Width: 110%; and Resample Image set to "BicubicSmoother. This will make the pic 10% bigger with no loss of definition.

The trick is to do this as many times as you need to get the enlargement factor you want. To speed this up, I recorded an "Action", called it enlarge, and when I need to enlarge a low-res pic, I simply keep clicking the "Play Selection" Action button until the pic grows big enough. The LH pic below has 11Xtimes 110% Enlarge and has grown from 300x300px to 940x940px; and is still nearly as clear as the original.

The original pic had been compressed down to "Low Quality" and 5.8kb in size - so you can see that it is possible to very quickly fake up a reasonable quality enlargement from a quite unpromising picture.