Newbe question

[TTA23]

I have a picture (PDF, EPS) that I want to insert in an illustrator document.
I want to scale up this document from 10" wide to 40" wide. The text is Ok, the picture is very bad.
Do I waste my time, because it is not possible to scale the picture without loss of quality?

Is there a way to do this without loss of quality?
Thanks in advance

 

[jmgalvin]

as long as the thing is raterized, which it probably is if it's a regular picture, it won't scale up much.

Sometimes, if a pic is of extraordinarily high resolution it can be scaled up quite a bit but rarely 4 times its original size.

The easiest way to check whether a pic can be scaled up at all is to open in photoshop and use Image Size. Uncheck Resample in that box and see what happens to the resolution. It will go down as the size goes up.

If you're going to use it on the web, you can generally get by with 72 dpi. For print 300 is the minimum. The pic still might look bad if you scale up. It depends on the quality of the original.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4