Upsizing or upscaling a digital photo means zooming or printing it beyond the level of detail that's actually present in the photo. For example, you might have an image that's 2000 pixels wide, but you want to print it at a sufficiently large size that the paper can accommodate 3000 pixels. Those extra 1000 dots simply don't exist, so your printer or your graphics package has to guess at what they might be. And not every software product is particularly good at guessing.

Equally, you might want to print just a portion of a photo. Perhaps you want to zoom in on that cute dog in the back of the shot and remove all the other bystanders. So although the image is 2000 pixels wide, the section you want to use is only 300 wide. And unless you want the printed image to be the size of a postage stamp, some guessing is going to be required in order to add some additional pixels to the 300.

Reshade is a program that can help here. It's a free download that runs to around 43 MB. The file is malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust. Once installed, you can load an image into the program, select the area that you want to concentrate on, and then adjust various parameters to improve the sharpness of that section.

In the sample screen shot here, I've been working with an image of myself that was taken on a digital camera in 1997. As you might imagine, the resolution of cameras in those days was not particularly good, but the program seems to be making a remarkable effort of sharpening the image. I will then probably load it into a different program to start improving the colours.  Read More