I am working on creating photo collages for my company. When I paste photos on the template, the size is not manageable, so I scale them down. When I try to scale them up to differing sizes they become blurred. What is causing this, and how can I correct it?

you mentioned both scaling down (making smaller) and scaling up (making larger). It does make a difference! So maybe you could be more specific which process you need to do?

to Gimp Chat, Matt!

One thing that may help is to change the resolution of your image. Most are at 72ppi, increase to 300 before scaling larger. Making images larger in gimp doesn't work as well as scaling them smaller. Some of the blurriness can be helped by using Sharpen. Click Filters > Enhance > Sharpen. You can control the amount of sharpening in the Sharpen dialog.

I like to use Inkscape for scaling images. I have written a text tutorial about scaling an image in Inkscape but I haven't put screen shots in it yet. I'll finish the tutorial and post it so you can give it a try.

Here are examples of an image with the resolution changed to 300ppi - a 96x96px image scaled to 200x200px using GIMP and Inkscape.

Neither is entirely satisfactory but the Inkscape scaled image looks a bit better.



You can download Inkscape here: http://www.inkscape.org/

Hi matt48170, Welcome To Gimp Chat.

I am working on a site where I have to scale images and I came across this. It does a fantastic job. You might want to try it..
image resize

cheers

Nice, Molly! I checked out the website and everything on it is free. I did a resize on the image and it looks pretty good. 96x96px to 200x200px.



The Inkscape tutorial is finished and available here.

To add to the discussion, make sure you don't scale an image down, then try to scale the smaller image back up.

A good rule of thumb is to always make use of as large of an original image as you can lay you hands on. You should scan or at the highest resolution you're planning on using and scale down from the original, as needed.

great website! I just turned a 300 px pic into an 800 px pic and no loss of sharpness!!!

Welcome to gimp chat Matt.

I find that with scaling down in GIMP you are best of to scale just once. When you are not happy with the size you scaled to, undo the first scaling and then scale again. If you scale an already scale image it can get very blurry.

What O said, ilters > Enhance > Sharpen works a treat to get rid of the tiny bit of blurriness you get from scaling (once).

Great site Molly. I've bookmarked it.

Thank you for all your helpful tips. I am new to GIMP, and am trying to teach myself as best I can. You will definately hear from me again...<G>.

Welcome To Gimp Chat matt48170!
Is it ok to just call you matt? =)

Hi,
I am surprised nobody mentioned the upsize plugin available in gimp plugin registry.
Works quite well.
Once installed you can find it under Image>upsize.

In the preferences you can find under tool options, Scaling set this to Sinc (Lanczos3) for best results.
Gerard.

And G'MIC has the same under Enhancements.

G'MIC has every filter known to mankind. lol =)
Okay not quite, but it is getting there!

I found a solution. I was creating a postcard flyer with GIMP and the text kept blurring when I scaled it down and/or tried to print it out. It looked terrible. I ended up re-creating it Inkscape and it scaled and printed perfectly. I was also able to save it as a PDF, unlike in GIMP. Inkscape doesn't take long to learn, I downloaded it and had my flyer re-created in less than an hour--just import your edited photos without text and add text in Inkscape.

Just google "inkscape" and download it for free.

In Gimp, when you create text, you can press the button "text to path", this creates a "Path" which in this case is a "vector" representation of the text that you can scale at will with no loss of sharpness even after numerous rotate/scale/shear/perspective. Its actually like a bit of InkScape inside Gimp.