enlarge 300 dpi photo to lower resolution

[Ken Lapp]

I know Photoshop fairly well, but this simple operation has me stumped. I have taken some photos with my digital camera at 300 dpi. I just want to use them on the web so they can be 72 dpi, but they are only about 250 pixels wide and I want them to be 500 pixels wide. I'm sure I was able to enlarge them to a reduced resolution in past versions of Photoshop without losing image quality. How can I do this with version 7? Any help greatly appreciated.

Ken

[Mathias Vejerslev]

Ken,

I don´t understand.

You say the photos are 250 pixels wide direct from camera? That is a quite small image.

Resolution has nothing to do with the pixel dimensions of an image. The resolution is only relevant when printing images.

On any computer monitor, the image will always display at the imaes pixel dimensions, and the resolution is completely ignored. The 72ppi web resolution is an old misunderstanding. In reality, it really doesn´t matter what the resolution is for web presentation. Only the pixel dimensions are important.

Thus, there´s no connection between pixel dimensions and resolution, only between physical dimensions (inches or centimeters in a print) and resolution.

I hope this clarifies it for you.

Mathias

[Ken Lapp]

Matthias,

Thanks for responding so quickly. Perhaps I don't know as much as I thought. I'm just asking because I'm sure that in past years, when I moved a photo that was 300 dpi to a new Photoshop document that was 72 dpi, the image that I moved because 4 times larger. Am I mistaken?

Ken

[Ken Lapp]

Matthias,

Thanks for taking the time to clear this up for me. I've learned something that I've wondered about for years.

Cheers,
Ken

[Ken Lapp]

Mathias,

Sorry I spelled you name incorrectly.

Ken

[Lundberg02]

You must have set your camera to save as jpg and Photoshop 7 reads the EXIF file data to give you a 250 pixel jpg image. I have no idea whether you can do anything about this if you don't have the raw image stored in the camera.