Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications

Scaling Up

When enlarging or reducing an image, don’t be afraid to slightly reduce or enlarge an image. When an image is scanned or captured by a digital camera, the number of pixels contained in that image is fixed. As long as the original digitizing process netted sufficient pixels for your intended use, fine. But when you enlarge an image in an image-editing application such as Photoshop, you’re attempting to generate missing information, a process called interpolation. This interpolation process works reasonably well (considering that you’re asking it to make something out of nothing), but the result is never as good as a proper-sized original scan. And the more drastic the transformation, the less satisfying the outcome (Figure 4.3).