Tutorial: Increasing clarity and crispness of pixelated photos with photoshop

So I picked this technique up after doing some client work involving small thumbnails that inevitably had to be stretched or were just poor quality.

First, might I say, this kitty is amazingly cute. Like, wow, I think I'm going to have an aneurysm this cat is so cute.

Anyway, back to the tut. Say you want to get decent quality from a poor photo after downsizing it. What I've done here is taken a photo, stretched it, saved it as a jpeg (like 400% it's size) on 1 quality, then resaved it again to cause even more data loss. Why? Just to prove a point.

Here's the initial photo:



Decent clarity eh?

Well let's say you started out with something of quality...


(click for full-size)

Well what many people may usually do is, resize the photo, then sharpen it. But if you sharpen it many times before downscaling, you can increase the clarity without making it look grainy and fragmented. Because you're adding pixels by sharpening, then decreasing pixels by way of Photoshop's bicubic downsampling. This order of operations produces very different results which are actually quite pleasing. Take a look at the last photo:



First slide is the original. 2nd slide is the upscaled lossy version, downscaled again, using no sharpening (strictly Photoshop's bicubic downsampling algorithm.) The 3rd one is the upscaled lossy version, but sharpened 2 times (same settings) and then downscaled. Actually looks a bit crisper than the first! You could get the first crisper, but it would undoubtedly look grainy.