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DPI and YOU - Understanding Resolution for Print and Web


david.atwell

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Almost two years, actually.  :-)  I was on a bit of a forum sabbatical between 2009-ish and last month.

 

Glad you liked it!

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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  • 1 month later...

Glad you liked it!  Thank you!

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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David, I was going to leave a short comment:  This was great!!!

But then decided this tut calls for a longer comment:  This was grrrreeeeeaaaaaattttttttt!!!! :P

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Thaaaaanks for your appreciaaaaaaaaaaaaation :-)

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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^^ What did vowels ever do to deserve this?

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You're right.  Vowels don't kill people.  Ppl kll ppl.

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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mn.

 

(too cryptic? Amen.)

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This isn't Wheel of Fortune. It's not like you're charged by the vowel here on the forum.

 

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

  • Upvote 2

The Paint.NET Blog: https://blog.getpaint.net/

Donations are always appreciated! https://www.getpaint.net/donate.html

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  • 1 year later...

Short answer: You can't.

Long answer: Yyyooouuu cccaaannn'''ttt...

Have you ever seen this scenario played out on TV? The CSI shows do it as often as

. Even
(and literally everything that comes out of his mouth is gibberish in that clip), though I'm willing to forgive him since it was the 80's and NO one knew what they were talking about. (But this is probably the funniest parody of Hollywood's computer illiteracy.)

Anyway, they're lying to you. There's no computer system in the world that can do what the computers in CSI are depicted as doing. While an image can easily be resized smaller, it can never satisfactorily be made larger. Why is that?

Because the image is made up of pixels, remember? [...]

Asking the computer to "enhance" it, like on CSI, is like giving someone a book with three out of every four pages missing and asking them to reconstruct the story. It can't be done very accurately, because the information isn't there, and there will never be any technology that will let us do that.**^

So, what can you do if you need the picture to be bigger?

Well, the easiest way is to just take a bigger picture. You'll never make an enlargement look as good a picture that was taken at the size you want.

But there are tricks you can employ. First, leave the drop-down menu in Paint.NET on "Best Quality." It'll automatically choose the best way of "guessing" at the missing information. Second, try running Gaussian Blur, followed by Sharpen. Repeat several times, and you'll get something passable. Keep in mind, though, this really only works at images that have been doubled in size at best. More than 200%, and you're getting into impossible territory.

And if you come up with a technique that works better, share it below! I am open to suggestions, most definitely.

[...]

**^ At least, not with our current understanding of technology.

 

This tutorial is still helpful to me, though it is almost six years old. If I may, I'd like to point out some advancements that have been made in more recent times.

 

There is a certain photo editing software (that isn't Paint.NET... yet) that has intelligent upsampling with its Preserve Details feature. Before this feature's release, the software had the ability to upsample and fill in the missing pixels without scaling down the image size. However it relied on the bicubic smoother, which actually made the edges and the image on a whole too soft (rather than being super sharp and pixel-y). Now the Preserve Details feature does a really good job of filling in the missing pixel information while still remaining close to the original image quality. It's a thing of beauty.

 

I will keep using this tutorial until this feature appears in Paint.NET. Perhaps I'll even be the one to write the plugin for this... in twenty years. (I'm a newbie at coding.) Thank you for all the help you've inadvertently provided me all of these years!

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Paint.net has bicubic resampling. Check out the options under Image > Resize > Resampling. These algorithms are used to 'fill in the blanks' when you resize an image to be larger than the original.

It is no surprise that the resultant details are softer. You're using (very clever) methods to smear the existing pixel data over a larger area.

There is still no way to "enhance" an image like CSI would have you believe. The data is just not there.

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  • 6 months later...

This was an outstanding explanation. It helped me understand it better than any other place I have read this information at. I've saved it onto a .pdf

 

I sincerely thank you.

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Glad to help! :)

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 month later...

Feel free!  Please just link back to the first page of the tutorial.  I'll even be happy to help if you have any questions about it!

  • Upvote 2

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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Feel free!  Please just link back to the first page of the tutorial.  I'll even be happy to help if you have any questions about it!

Thank you so much !

ba2ec8c.png

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nitenurse79 - I'm glad you found this useful!

 

So, I'm going back through and reexamining my old tutorials to make sure nothing needs to be updated.  Are there any burning questions anyone happens to have about DPI (either in general, or as it relates to PdN in particular)?  I might do an updated version in the not-so-distant future.

Is there a image format that is above others in keeping resolution etc etc ?

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Always save a copy in paint.net's own format '.pdn', if you intend to re-edit later (it preserves layers and is lossless).

For single layer images .png (portable network graphic) is good as it saves transparency and is 'lossless'  and widely used.

  • Upvote 1

 

Red ochre Plugin pack.............. Diabolical Drawings ................Real Paintings

 

PdnForumSig2.jpg

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Dots per inch

I think he knows. He built the program. ;)

Is there a image format that is above others in keeping resolution etc etc ?

Red Ochre's reply is correct. PDN if there are layers, PNG if not.

 

The Doctor: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior... A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.
Amy: But how did it end up in there?
The Doctor: You know fairy tales. A good wizard tricked it.
River Song: I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.

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  • 1 month later...

hallo David, what does the DPI-value cause here in the application report? (see file attached)

It is set to 96 DPI, and I am afraid this is why when I resize Images having a high resolution the result is not as it should be.

Example: I have a picture with 300 DPI and over 1200px width. I resize it (I shrink it) without changing the resolution and the effect on screen is a bit blurrier as expected... 

Maybe this is a pre-setting I can adjust?

 

app_report.txt

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  • 2 months later...

-The writers of CSI are dirty rotten liars. (Well, they don't know computer graphics as well as they claim to. Same thing.)

 

 

Hmmm... I doubt that. It is simply called TV.  :D  :D  :D

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  • 1 month later...

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