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I am new here. I just had a question I hope you "guru's" can help me with. I am working with an image (a floor plan) and it was originally 30" wide, and had incredible clarity. It has since been shrunk down to 2" wide. I want to enlarge the image again, but when I do, the image becomes very pixillated (sp?) Is there a way to enlarge this image (about 20" wide) without losing clarity, and especially readability? Any help you guys could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
Really your options are limited when you're working with something that small to that big. PS is pretty good at doing resizes when the aspect ration is retained (hold down shift while dragging from the corner of the resize box), but 2" to 30" is a long way, and wouldn't do much for your text.
Your only other alternative is to redo it in Illustrator or CAD.
We're talking of minute line drawing detail here. By shrinking down a 30" to 2" and resizing it to the original you end up with the blur coz much of the data has been lost in the resizing. Sharpen or sharpen mask can help a bit but you won't be able to regain the original crispness.
My best advice is not to shrink the drawing plans to more than a fifth of its original. In your case, for really big one's, one-third size at 150dpi will be safe. Detail will still be there. File size may be a big, but it's best to preserve detail. Why did you shrink it to 2" in the first place?
Check what I'm up against here. original size 300 dpi, 22" shrunk to 300dpi, 2" and enlarged back to 300, 20".
You really need the original. I tried the same thing with a small version of a file and it never did turn out the way I wanted it to. Hopefully there is a way for you to obtain the original file. That would help you so much. Welcome!!! Love your signature. Isn't it a wonderful force of life in your heart? I don't ever want to go back to the old me. [excited]
Wow V our posts hit at the same time...thanks!!!!!
Hope you become a permanent contributing member, asking questions and also answering questions when you have "the answer" or an "option" or, a good "idea" or, as you can see, just a thought about anything!
Good luck on your problem. Once you shrink it down, you can never go back , he he he he. No graphics programs (that I know about) can intuitively find where to put back the extra pixels. (gives a with sympathy look).
I really didn't expect so many replies so quickly!! I really appreciate the help. To answer some of the questions, I am an architect-in-training. I am actually in school at the University of Cincinnati but I am on an internship working for an architecture firm here in Colorado. In any case, the original was not saved after he shrunk it down unfortunately. What I have done is gone into CAD and redrawn it and plotted as an EPS file at a huge scale. I brought it back into Photoshop and it looks so much better now. I guess there was no easy way to do it, although I was hoping! But thanks again for all the replies. I really appreciate it, and I hope that I can contribute some of my knowledge (as limited as it may be). Take care guys!
I was thinking that for next time you could inport the image into a vector program and convert the raster image into a vector image (I would imagine a tool under a menu to do this), then when you save it, the file should be much smaller then a raster image, and contain all the detail! with little amount of work! This would work better with an image with fewer colours. I remember my Flash trial being able to do this. I would imagine Freehand, Illustrator, Xara or Corel Draw could also do this.
This can't really help you this time, but next time it could!
Enlarging images without losing clarity 
Linear Mode
