BB FANS

I wonder if anyone can help me. I scanned in two photographs to my pc and emailed them to a company who are going to print the photos on a handbag (for my sister's birthday). They have just emailed me and said the photos are too small and can I email them back making sure they are 500KB in size. I have no idea what size this is and when I went in just to enlarge the photo myself on the pc, it only allowed me to use the measurements pixels, cms or inches. Is this resizing something I can do on the pc and if so can you tell me how, or do I have to take the photos to a photo shop and ask them to enlarge them.

I don't know how small the pics were to start with, but when I scan pictures, there is an option on my scanner for the size they are scanned at. usually the higest quality says something like''to be printed''.
Check that first and try scanning again.
if a picture is quite small to start with, there is only so much you can enlarge before you compromise on quality.

Theres a thing called Infra View that you can download, I think.

Irfan View it's called. It's quite useful.

I personally use Paint Shop Pro for things like that but again, beware, if the file is only small, then increasing the size by a large amount will make it look blurry.

I agree about Paint Shop Pro.
It's easy to resize an image with this but as already said if the original image is small then there will bit a limit to how much to can blow them up before they begin pixelating and looking blurry.

Thanks guys though I'm no far forward really, as I don't have paintshop, so have no idea if the image would go blurry. Any other suggestions or advice would be helpful.

Ive just got this and its very easy to use.

http://www.download.com/IrfanView/3000- ... ag=lst-0-1

What dpi are you scanning the original image in ?
You can always increase this as the higher dpi the larger the resulting image file size.
So if you scanned at 72dpi last time do another at 300 dpi this time. Also use a file format with less compression than Jpeg. Like TIF or PNG.
Both methods will increase the image file size and produce a sharper image.

The local printers use programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Photoshop so they should be able to cope with most image file formats.

Larry thanks very much for the advice. Unfortunately I am a total doofus when it comes to computers and have no idea what dpi, Jpeg or any of those other things means. All I do is put the photo on the scanner, press scan and it scans, but I will have a look tomorrow at the options available and see if there is anything there which you are referring to. I may come back and ask for more help if I get stuck, if you don't mind.

Thanks CC100 for the link, I will try that also tomorrow when I have a bit more time.

Right I'm back for more advice, I took the photos into a photo shop and the guy there told me the same as you Larry, so when scanning I increased the DPI from 150 (which is what it was set as) to 300 and re-scanned the pictures. My question now is how do I know what 500KB is in size. This techno-speak means nothing to me and the options on the computer are to enlarge the photos by inches, cms or pixels but not KB, so I don't know how big to make them. The photos were originally 6X4. Can anyone advise me, please.

Next questions are which Scanner do you have and what paint program are you using to work on the images once scanned ?

Blags has very kindly (thank you Blags) sent me through a link for paint shop pro and I have a hp psc 950 scanner/photocopier/fax/printer thingy. When I scan the picture in there is an option to resize the pic, but I don't know what size to resize it to as I don't understand what 500KB in size means.

If I've got my math correct then scan at 300dpi or higher (this will help with the fine detail).
As your picture is 6 inches by 4 inches then this is (6 x 300) by (4 x 300) = 1800 x 1200 pixels which means the uncompressed image is 2.1 MBytes.
Now if you save the image as say TIF which is uncompressed the file keeps it's original size and quality. If you save the image as JPG then you might have a high compression ratio that'll reduce the file size and quality of the saved image.

When you select save in PSP the top line in the box that appears is for the file name which you type. The one below that is the File type. Click it and a list will appear. Scoll through it until you see TIF and then click it and then click save.

You should now have a file large enough in size for the printers to work from. If all they want is a bigger files size and they haven't told you a DPI they want the this should do what you need.

Thank you very much Blags and Larry for all your advice on this. I have now managed to successfully (fingers crossed) send the photos of. I couldnt have done it without you guys, so cheers.

Glad to be able to help.