Question: How to keep clarity high while expanding images?

[Boom]

Sometimes the images I want to mess with are too small and when I make them larger the images become fuzzy and very unclear, naturally. I was wanting to know if there was a way to expand images with PDN and retain their original, or a good deal of, clarity. Thanks peoples. Be cool, I remain....

-Boom

[Overkill]

Well, your best option would be to maintain the ratio while resizing your image.

When having the resizing tab open, make sure you have 'By absolute size' ticked and under that tick 'maintain aspect ratio'.

By changing one of the values, be it width or height, the other gets calculated automatically according to the picture's resolution and the number you entered.

Good luck.

[-Expiration-]

Nope, this is impossible. Making an image from small to big will reduce quality by a lot. The extra pixels created by resizing will have to be interpreted by the computer, which draws on information from nearby pixels. This makes it blurry. It's like creating something from nothing, which is not possible.

Vector imaging, however, can be resized infinitely, but there is a limit to how much detail you can put into a vector, and Paint.NET does not support vectors.

[Max Power]

...or just press and hold shift while resizing the selection. The Sharpen+ plugin is helpful, too.

[Overkill]

Well, it really depends on how much he wants to shrink a picture and how big the picture really is. Expired is right though, increasing the resolution of a small image doesn't match, but it does work while doing it vice versa.

And like Max said, the 'Sharpen' tool is another alternative.

[Tanel]

You could try different freeware for that operation if not satisfied with PdN output.

For example Irfanview, which is a little bit better when resizing with Lanczos filter.

Then copy it back to PdN for sharpening etc.