Enhancing a JPEG

[OldSpice]

Hi Guys,

Is it possible to enhance the quality of a JPEG. I've got a picture of a friend around 8MP that I want to get printed as a cardboard cutout. The image will work fine from a few metres away but will start to look blocky when people get close. I'm wondering if there's a way to enhance the quality of the image to avoid this.

Thanks!

[TurricanII]

I would zoom into the original picture on a computer and look at an area that appears blocky on the card. If the card is blocky and the original image is not, then the printer who put the image onto card might have scaled down the image for some reason - speak to them.

If the quality is the same then you can see the blocks because the image is printed at a scale that allows you to see the fine details/pixels/blocks in the JPEG compression.

I think a mild blur effect over the whole picture might smooth out some blocks at the risk of loosing fine details.

[budfox]

TurricanII said:

I would zoom into the original picture on a computer and look at an area that appears blocky on the card. If the card is blocky and the original image is not, then the printer who put the image onto card might have scaled down the image for some reason - speak to them.

If the quality is the same then you can see the blocks because the image is printed at a scale that allows you to see the fine details/pixels/blocks in the JPEG compression.

I think a mild blur effect over the whole picture might smooth out some blocks at the risk of loosing fine details.

I don't think he's had it printed yet.

OP - There's not a great deal you can do, other than make sure you have the original image and not one that has been re-saved. (Just opening and saving as a new image reduces the quality).

[Tonsko]

Any help?

[mmm-five]

I've used OnOne's Perfect Resize in Photoshop a few times in the past. The marketing blurb says it uses a fractal algorithm to scale up images with much less loss of definition that just using the normal Photoshop scaling tools, or, heaven-forbid, just using scale-to-fit in the print options.

Seemed to work for our purposes going from a 40mb A3 300dpi file to a 400mb A1 300dpi file.

Even this sort of thing has its limitations though - just have a close look at some large billboard posters and you'll see they're not perfect either.

[OldSpice]

Thanks for the responses guys!

[markmullen]

You can upscale to an extent but essentially you're looking at GIGO, garbage in, garbage out, particularly with a JPEG where some of the information has already been discarded to reduce the file size.