Photos small and pixilated 1

[JennyW]

Hiee,

Sometimes when I bring up a downloaded photograph into Adobe Illustrator the photo becomes very very small. If I enlarge the photo to its original size it gets pixilated.

Why is this happening?

Note: The photo is fine and in its original form when I bring it up in Photoshop 5.0.

Jenny

 

[Polyanna]

That is because the photo you downloaded is 72 dpi. The page you are working in is 300 dpi a vector program. Therefore it's not suitable for printing. If you are using the item as a template, ignore the pixelation, enlarge it and draw.

 

[JennyW]

Hi,
Thanks for replying.
Ok, I understand - sorta. The thing is the photo is real small when I import it into Illustrator. Now when I enlarge the photograph it becomes all pixilated.

I don't want to print it. I just want to enlarge it a tiny bit and put it on my website.

Wait I just re-re-re-read what you wrote. Are you saying that it will look pixilated in Illustrator (because Illustrator is 300 dpi and the pic is 72 dpi), but when I import it in say....Dreamweaver it will look normal again?

Jenny

 

[Polyanna]

That should work.

 

[askIllustrator]

Pixel based imagery is like cutting hair, you can always take away but forget about addition without an expensive weave. 72 dot per inch means just that, in one inch of you image you would find 72 pixels lined up each a slightly different color to give the effect of a smooth blend. The problem is you cannot ask these same pixels to cover a larger area say 150 dot per inch. Instead what happens is each pixel moves away from its neighbor and trys to fill in the blank with a color inbetween itself and its old neighbor. This is called intropolation and is not an exact science when you condsider the pixel has to preform this calculation for every other pixel it touches. In a nutshell, until we get better intropolation algorhythms scaling a low-res (100 dpi and under) image is just not recommended.

 

[JennyW]

Hiee,

Thanks for the explanation jAQUAN.
You have a good way with words!

Jenny