Increasing resolution

Arrggh. One of my pet peeves - people who share photos in a resolution too low to allow a decent print. At that low resolution, there won't be anything magic you can do to increase the quality and maintain the size, although there is one technique that might improve it. Is there any chance you can just get the person to send you a higher quality picture?! No, huh. Well...

First, make sure you've got the image saved in a non-lossy format like PSD or TIFF. If the resolution was 72ppi, chances are good it's also a JPEG image, which loses even more quality each time it's worked on and then resaved.

Then, in Image>Resize>Image Size, make sure the boxes for "Constrain Proportions" and "Resample" have check marks. Also make sure the options available for resampling have "Bicubic" selected. Now, start increasing the resolution in 10% increments. For example, go from 72ppi to about 77ppi. Then move up to about 84ppi, etc. Keep working it upwards, but I wouldn't even bother trying to go anything above about 140 or 150. That's still bare minimum for a good print under ordinary circumstances, but I doubt pushing beyond that in this case would gain anything.

The other thing you can do once you get the resolution up is to reduce the image size. To do that, you'd want to be back in Image>Resize>Image Size, but this time making sure there were no checkmarks for Constrain Proportions and Resample. Get the resolution up a little and then let Elements use the extra pixels to create a smaller image. That might improve the quality a touch, too.

Good luck. I've used this technique before, but I was never trying to get so much out of so little. I don't know if it'll produce anything satisfactory or not.