There are hundreds of different solutions to reduce the size of photographs but few to increase them. Surely anyone will have noticed that, when you decrease the size of a photograph or image, there is no loss of quality while if you try to increase them by trying to make the digital image bigger, then you are left with a photo all grainy and with outlines no longer defined and without sharpness. Enlarging a photo means increasing its resolution and doing something similar to a zoom, for example to try to recognize a face that is too small in the original or to read an illegible text.
This is typical in espionage movies when you see those computer centers where agents use sophisticated image reworking programs to recognize the villain or suspect from a photo. This can be very useful in everyday situations where photos were taken in low resolution from a digital camera or mobile phone.
In this post we see all the programs and web apps for Windows and for Mac, which are used to enlarge images without losing quality or blur, to change the contrast and refine or highlight the contours of the images .
1) SmillaEnlarger is a program that can be used to view enlarged photos, enlarge and increase the size and resolution of the image .
The results depend on the resolution, the quality of the photos. Clearly, the more you want a large photo, the more difficult it is to have satisfying results. The Image Enlarger program starts without having to install it and opens with two windows, one showing the original image, the other with a zoomed and enlarged part. The right pane shows only a part of the image in a square which is the zoom but only acts as a preview to refine contrasts, sharpness and outlines because in any case the photo is enlarged in full.
The new dimensions can be chosen by writing the pixels by hand or by moving the zoom bar which maintains the proportions of width and height. By pressing down on the "Browse" button, next to "Source", you can choose the photograph or image to enlarge. The preview is not automatic and you have to press the button to see the effects caused by the 6 basic values to make the magnification less blurry as possible. The key to save the new file with the enlarged image is "Calculate", the file name is indicated where "Enlarged" is written and is saved in the same folder where the original is located, without obviously replacing it.
It is possible to change the area that is used for the preview to ensure that the most important areas of the photograph are displayed well in the new resolution. Nothing sensational, surely there are other programs that can enlarge the images trying to refine them and maintain a decent visualization, however this is really simple to use and it does everything with a couple of clicks so we like it.
2) Another perfect program to enlarge images without losing quality is A Sharper Scaling to resize photos up to 400% without the blur or grainy effect. This software supports four different algorithms for enlarging images, allows you to check the possible previews and choose the one that works best to save it as a TIFF, PNG, JPEG image. After downloading and opening the program, add the image and select the resizing mode by choosing the target size in 50%, 100% scale, etc.
3) Reshade is a third program for enlarging images similar to the other two, completely free, easy to use and that works well for resizing photos as you want, even by resetting the aspect ratio.
4) PicHance is an online tool to increase the resolution and the size of an image, up to 4 times, using artificial intelligence technology. The web app is really simple to use, just visit the website, create a free account and upload a small or low resolution photo, to be enlarged. Once the image is loaded, follow the steps on the screen to increase the image size and resolution for free.
5) AI Image Enlarger is a recent program released in 2019 that uses artificial intelligence to enlarge an image or a photo without it losing quality, reconstructing it automatically. The program is completely automatic, it allows you to choose a faster and less precise processing or a slower one that ensures better quality and offers the option to double or quadruple the size of the image.
This free software requires an Internet connection because the image processing is done on the servers of the AI Img Enlarger service and not locally. You can therefore also use the online version without downloading anything to have the same functionality. AI Image Enlarge accepts jpg, jpeg and png files, images with a resolution less than 800x750 and a size less than 3 Megabytes.
6) Let's Enhance is a web application that allows you to enlarge and enlarge images without loss of quality, which can be used for free and quickly without downloading any programs. The result is almost always satisfactory and for its ease it perhaps becomes the first solution to try.
7) ImageEnlarger.com is a free website where you can easily enlarge images and improve small images and quality.
8) Photo Enlarger is another online platform that converts files into different magnified image outputs from which you can choose one. With the help of the slider, you can adjust the width, proportions and height.
9) ImageResizer.com is a simple and automatic online image enlarger.
10) Webupon.com is an online image enlarger where you can upload the file here and choose your own width and height.
11) ResizeFile.com is a free website to use as an image enlarger, compress files in KB and convert images to different formats.
12) BigJPG offers extraordinary enlarger functionality and, for example, you can add a file with a size of 10 MB and a resolution of 3000x3000px.
13) Deep Image AI is a highly advanced artificial intelligence based image enlarger.
14) PIXizer allows you to increase the size and resolution of small images, from 10% to 75%.
15) ImageUpscaler is another web application to quickly enlarge images automatically.
16) The best way to enlarge images without losing quality is to convert them into vector images .
To know how to create a vector image and what differences there are with normal images, I refer to another article where some automatic conversion programs are reported. Practically, taken a small image, it maintains the same quality, smoothing out the details without making it grainy or blurry.
In another article there is the reverse operation with the best programs to compress images and photos by decreasing the size.
