How Much Clarity Will A Picture Lose If Made Into A Poster? (Kodak, photoshop)

[ylisa7]

We are decorating our house and I have some really nice pictures of our mountain views. The camera is an Kodak Easy Share as I am no professional. I would love to blow some up to poster size and frame them.

How will this affect the quality? Any suggestions on the best way to do this? I was going to just use Wal-mart.

I don't have any photo enhancing(?) equipment.

Thanks,
Lisa

[sanspeur]

It depends on the resolution of your camera...How many pixels do you have to work with, although there is a way to cheat a bit.

If you really want to digitally enlarge a digital image then the best bet is to either use proven workflow routines to optimize enlarging or get software specifically designed for this purpose (i.e. Genuine Fractals or SI Pro). If you are using a program such as Adobe Photoshop, the "quick & dirty" way to do a reasonable digital enlargement results is by doing the enlargement in increments of 10%. Keep doing 10% enlargements until the distortion that results becomes too great for you and then step back one step and save the resulting enlarged image. There are much better, but more complicated Photoshop techniques. An excellent one can be found on Digital Outback (update: a free Photoshop Action that does this routine in one mouse click is now provided on that website). For others, do an Internet search for "Upsizing Digital Images" and "Enlarging Digital Images."

All About Digital Photos - Changing the Size of a Digital Photo

[darling876]

This is a company that I have used in the past for printing poster size pictures.. came out awesome and their turn around is very fast. FullSizePosters.com Your Pictures as Full Size Posters. Overnight.