Ok guys. Here's a test image taken with a 4 pixels digicam:
http://www.pbase.com/image/33056371
Yeah, that's right, 4 pixels, not Mega pixels. You can actually see it as a very very small 2 pixels white diagonal line on top of the file name (tiles.jpg).
It's just a pic of my bathroom floor tiles at a very poor resolution.
Now download the image to your PC and open it in your favourite image editing program. Go to "image resize" and make sure you select "pixel resize" or "nearest neighbour" as the resize method. Now enlarge it big, at least by some 1000%.
Wow ! The tiles are all there, with sharp well defined edges. You can continue enlarging them enough to print the image at stadium size, and everything is still absolutely sharp and beautiful.
Now repeat with your favourite resize method (I suspect it's bicubic, but YMMV). Oh s**t ! Were did all those sharp well defined edges diseappear ? What a muddy c**p ! Try to fix that with unsharp mask !
So now you know why your digipics look soft when you enlarge them for large format printing. You just picked the wrong resize method. Now pick the good one and voila, you can get stadium sized beautiful sharp prints !
Bwahaaaaa !
;-)
