OK, I have all of the software in the world... Paintship Pro 7 and Photoshiop both, now I need help with an image. I screwed up my decals for a kit. I found the image online, but it is low resolution. I had to cut it from a picture of a flad. Now I need to increase the resolution a lot and shrink it to fit the kit.

Any image editors out there that can help me? This is one computer skill I have never managed to get down.

Hmmm. That's a tough one.
You might try resizing the image to a larger size, then using Photoshop to blur and sharpen it to get it to look better. If you want, e-mail it to me and I'll see what I can do! :-) (PM me about my e-mail address)

YodaMan

Here's what I do.

1) Zoom in on the image. Make sure you can see the entire image in your screen.
2) Hit your 'Print Scrn' key (this copies your desktop screen into your clipboard.
3) in Photoshop, type 'Ctrl+N', then hit enter, then type 'Ctrl+V' to paste the screen capture.
4) Crop the area of the image you want to reduce using the crop tool.
5) Apply some Gaussian blur to the image
6) Resize the image to the desired size.
7) Apply filters and levels to get it the way you want.

This system works okay on some images. I guess you have to experiment and see what turns out.

best of luck!

- Dave
http://www.digitaldioramas.com/

Or....send the image to me and I will see what can be done.

Jim

If the image quality is "really, really" bad and you have Photoshop. You might need to consider the follow steps:

1) blow up the image size. For this you have to decide what's the size of your final output and resolutions. For example, if the final decal is going to be image of 1.5 inch in height and thinking of outputting it in 300 dpi, then you should increase the size by going to the "image size" dialogue box ( under image of the top menu bar ) and assign 1.5in and put in 300 to the pixel per in option and click OK.

2) Then you should see if the edge of the blow-up image is really burry. Try sharpen it may be one option but if all the minute details are really blurred together with a lot of gray pixels mixing together, then you might have to go to step three.

3) Use the pen tool to create an outline for all the shapes ( make sure you same the outline with a name eg. decal outline. otherwise you can easily overwrite it if you work with the pen tool with some other work! ) Then create a new layer with the layer menu. Go back to the path menu and highlight the path you had created and choose "make selection" by clicking on the flyout menu button ( the one on the top right corner of the floating path menu )
Then choose the foreground color to black and go to "edit" at the menu bar at the top and choose "fill" with option of fill with foreground color and blend in 100%. Then you can have a really nice crisp artwork of the decal. If you are satisfy with the result, delete the original bgd scan image and choose "flatten image" from the floating layer menu. ( Or better still, save this file with a different name from the scan image in case if you need the scan image again )

You might need to do a little practice with the pen tool in order to control the handles of individual points in creating good smooth curves but it's well worth the effort. For detail of how to control the points in a path, you can consult your manual of Photoshop.

Hope this will help.

vince