An interesting breakthrough. (Beware 56k-ers)

This thread will probably be short lived, but no matter. I have discovered something that is probably the #1 reason that every graphic artist here should get there hands on Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 as soon as possible.

Smart Objects in Photoshop, and Live Trace in Illustrator.

Using Live Trace, you can convert pixels to paths. That means you can make a pixel image into a vector! Which, conseqently, means you can enlarge images without losing quality. From there...

Use Photoshop CS2's Smart Objects option to copy the vector image and place it in a regular image file. From there, you can save it as a jpg! This is a wonderful breakthrough in image enlargement, and while it doesn't keep all the quality, it serves a good purpose for those struggling with blurry crappy enlarged images.

Here are a few examples of what it can do:

Original image:


Enlargment:



Original image:


Enlargement:

(For this one, I played around with settings and chose to lower the quality. There are quite a lot of ways to make a pixel image into a vector - from black and white to greyscale, to color, and you can choose all sorts of settings that make it look less or more pixellated. You can also blur it.)

The quality is, of course, not completely preserved. But it's a step up for sure - tracing each of these images took about ten seconds to make them the way they were. To preserve perfect quality... which can't be done, as the color limit is 256... you'd probably have to wait a minute or more for each image to trace. But it's a nice things to have, nonetheless.



This is a comparison between an enlargement in PSP, and the same enlargement using Live Trace in Illustrator CS2. As you can see, both resizes have their pros and cons... one obviously keeps more of the color and shape, while the bottom (the vector resize) loses a bit of form, while keeping the brightness of the original image and losing a bit of the pixellated aspect. The above image keeps detail - at the cost of a bit of quality.

Oh, and yes... you CAN enlarge an image so that it shows it like each pixel is there, instead of how a normal image editor would mesh smooth the pixels together like the PSP example above. It would look like this:




EDIT: I never even tried to look, but it turns out that there is software specifically for image enlargement without loss of quality. I think I'll look into these programs a bit, to find out how well they work... but for now, discuss the above anyway =P.

EDIT: And a breakthrough in enlarging lineart!

Original Image:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...enportrait.jpg

Enlargement (too large to display):
http://img156.echo.cx/img156/2672/newlineart8vz.jpg


And a second try with something more detailed:

Original Image:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...madensmall.jpg

Enlargement:
http://img101.echo.cx/img101/1271/newlineart23zx.jpg

This is really interesting. I just noticed this thread. I'm really surprised at the quality of the enlarged image, its not exactly paint quality, heh. I just recently began using GIMP, and it does have paths, but I didn't know what they were for. Better try it out as well.

thats pretty cool.. thx for that info.. but i dont got eather of those programs... nice to kno tho for if i ever do..

Cool! To bad I can only afford Photoshop Elements 3....Anyway,wow that's cool. Enlarging a picture without blurs....