Changing quality of photograph

A nifty trick to help, especially on those images where you will have a clipping path, is to use Corel Draw's Powerclip. If you have a low res of an object like a  cell phone and need a high quality floating image, you can carefully trace an outline around the 'jagged' lo res bitmap and then powerclip the bitmap inside the outline. You can scale it up then without your outside edges growing more stair-stepped. This won't help the detail away from the edges but will often make a marginal image usable.

 Rikk

I feel your pain brother! I have to try to produce *upmarket* work with low res and over-compressed images all the time. The jpeg artifacts at low compression are just horrible. One suggestion I have, which I've started doing recently goes like this: In Photopain there is a "touch up" tool in the red-eye reduction flyout. It adds slight blurs and acts as a sort of smoothing airbrush tool - great for quick on-the-fly blemish and wrinkle removal in portrait photos. It's also good for smoothing over those blocky jpeg artifacts. Because it's like a brush, not a filter, it's easier to smooth over the worst bits. But at the end of the day, you can't polish a turd. I'm doing a CD cover right now and the image I have is about 3cm's wide @ 72 dpi from a 1megpixel cellphone! So far I've experimented with duplicating the image 2 or 3 times, over-sharpening and over-blurring different layers and applying different blend modes... with some interesting results. I might post the two at some point as a comparison.

I do engraving and am receiving a lot of requests to put photos, usually people or animals, on wood, glass, etc. A poor photo to start with means you work like crazy and may or may not get a usable image. However, the customer does not recognize the amount of time this takes and is unwilling to pay for it. After several times of spending 10-20 hours and charging for 3 or 4, I now require at least a well detailed photo. Contrast can often be adjusted, touch ups done, and cutouts take care of a lot of background problems, but it really depends on what you start with. Up to recently I was willing to put in the extra time because I charged it up to a learning curve. But the others are right - garbage in cannot result in quality out. What makes a beautiful picture, does not necessarily make a good graphic.