How To Convert Low-Res To High-Res Graphic In Photoshop

I'm going to show you two ways to convert low-resolution graphics into high-resolution in Photoshop, regardless of whether your graphic is black and white or colored to start with. Now, I must preface all of this by saying that these methods are only going to work if your graphic has one to two colors beyond the background color. If you have three or more colors within your graphics, you'll want to use Illustrator instead for this type of resolution enhancement. It's also important to temper your expectations a little bit because depending on how low-res your original file is, you'll get varied results in the end. That's because this technique is rebuilding edge detail from scratch based on the limited information from the starting file. So with a super pixelated starting graphic, the final result will look a bit messier compared to a higher quality starting point. But regardless, you're going to see an improvement, so let's begin. Now our first method is going to use some filters, and the first step in this process is going in upsizing the resolution of your starting graphic. The reason for that is that there's some amazing little resampling tools inside of Photoshop that will do a lot of edge improvements for you, and when you have a larger resolution and canvas size to work from, all of the other adjustments are going to look better as well, so the canvas and resolution changes are a really important starting point. We can easily do this after your graphic is opened in Photoshop, just by going up to Image, and down here to Image Size. In the window that appears, make sure we set the resample to Preserve Details 2.0, and then for the resolution, if it's not already, I'll just go and type in 300 here. This will automatically change the width and height of the document to fit the new pixel density for the resolution. If your project is already 300 pixels per inch, you can just skip this step. But with this good to go, I'll click OK, and now our canvas is going to get quite a bit bigger, and so I'll zoom out to fit the new size. Now it's going to look slightly sharper than it did before, but when we zoom in, it of course still lacks that sharp edge that we're looking for. So what we can do is apply a blur filter to first get rid of any pixelation or blockiness around the edges, and then once that blur filter is applied, we can add sharpening back by using some contrast. To make this non-destructive, I'll first click on the background layer and press Command or Ctrl J to duplicate it. Now with that duplicated layer selected, I'll go up to Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur. What we want to do here is just create a radius that is large enough to smooth out the edges within the graphic, but not lose details. For example, this is obviously way too much because we can't see the little details and the small lines, but if we go too low, it doesn't really make any difference from the original. So just enough to smooth out some of those details and make the design look a little bit cleaner. In this case, about two pixels for the radius works for this project. I'll click OK. Now of course we have just a blurry graphic now. So to add back sharpness, we just need to add some contrast. The reason for that is if we think of what a blur is, we essentially have black, grey, and then white at the top in this case. If we can remove this grey and make the transition from black to white, basically immediate and a hard edge, then we're going to give the perception of a hard edge within this graphic as well. By using curves, we can quickly make those changes. To add a Curves Adjustment layer, I'll go to the Adjustments panel and add a new Curves Adjustment at the top of the layer stack, and then I'll add a Clipping Mask so that it is directly affecting the layer beneath it. If you don't see the Adjustments panel, just click on the Adjustments icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and then go to Curves from there. Regardless of how you make that adjustment, we're just going to use these little sliders down here at the bottom. If I go and move this slider here, that's going to increase the black point, so it's going to add more black into the photo. If I go and adjust the other point, which is the white point, that's going to increase the intensity of white, and as these two points narrow, there's less of a range for grey to be displayed in. Therefore, as we bring these closer together, you can see how the edge of the design becomes more and more sharp. If we go too crazy with this, we'll start to get some blocky edges, which we aren't looking for. So play around with them until you have a nice blend of sharp edges, but they aren't blocky. Zooming out to get a better view of things at a distance, this is looking really good to me. Turning that on and off, the Curves Adjustment layer, all of the little details in his face still look good, and everything is looking nice and sharp. But now to compare this to our original, I'll just zoom in again with the original photo added in. This was our original graphic, and then this is after our improvements. So just turning this on and off, you can see how much sharper that looks within the design. We could use this now at a much larger scale, and we wouldn't have to worry about the quality looking bad. It also maintains all of these little line details pretty well, so I would call that a win. Now before we move on to our second method, which may work a bit better for some of you, I recognize that there's a lot of little steps in all of these processes that are easy to forget. So I created a free lesson cheat sheet covering everything from this lesson that you can find in the description or pinned comment below. That way you can have a summarized version of all of these steps to make it easier in your next project. Again, it's totally free and you can grab your copy in the description below. Now our second method is a little bit different in the sense that it uses selections and the Select and Mask workspace to make our refinements. But with the help of a little brush adjustment that I think is super worthwhile, we can make some nice improvements and touch-ups to the final result. The starting point of this process would again begin with our upscaling that we started with in the previous example. But since I've already done that, I've already upscaled this image to 300ppi from its previous 72ppi. That means it's at a good starting point for these adjustments. Now for most graphics, the easiest way to create the selection is just by accessing the Quick Selection tool by pressing W or you can find it right here within your toolbar. And then in the Options bar, we can go and choose Cloud Detailed Results and then choose Select Subject while your graphic layer is selected in the layer stack. If there are any areas that were selected that you wanted to include or didn't want to include, you can always add or subtract from your selection by choosing the Add or Subtract mode up here in the Options bar and then painting over your selection accordingly. In this case, I'm happy with how the selection is looking because it was a pretty simple selection. But now let's go and apply a layer mask. I can do this while my selection is active just by clicking on the desired layer and then adding a layer mask. This will now remove the background. But if we zoom in, we'll still have that problem of slightly soft edges. But to fix this, we can now use the Select and Mask workspace and some useful sliders that are only available within that workspace. To access Select and Mask, just double click on your layer mask thumbnail and this will bring up a new workspace called Select and Mask. Over on the side, we have the Global Refinements and the Smooth, Feather and Contrast sliders are the ones that will make the biggest difference for us. The Smooth slider is going to smooth any jaggedness around the selection. So if you have any bumpy edges, play around with the Smooth slider until it looks nice. The only thing to remember is that if you have a lot of fine details within your selection, the Smooth slider might get rid of some of them. So use it sparingly. Next up, similar to the first example where we're going to add a little bit of blur to further smooth the edges, we can add some feather, which is again going to add blur. But rather than being called blur, it's just called a feather. So it's just adding a bit of softening around every edge within our selection. If I increase this a ton, you can see how this looks here. So just again, use the feather sparingly until you just have those smooth, blurry edges around your selection. Now to make this all sharp once again, we need to go and add contrast similar to what we did in the first example with the curves adjustment. Now it's just consolidated into a slider. Going to the contrast setting, I can drag this up like so, and it's going to remove the gray around those blurred edges and therefore make the transition between the visible and not visible area a lot more harsh. Therefore, we have that sharp edge coming back into view. Looking around here, it looks pretty good to me. If there are any weird areas that still stand out to you, you can go and use the Shift Edge slider to move your selection edge inwards or outwards by a certain percentage. But I'm happy with how this is looking for me. With this good to go, I'm now ready to bring this into the main Photoshop workspace again. So I'll set the output to New Layer with Layer Mask and then I'll click OK. This will create a duplicate version of our original image with the cutout. I'll just call this to Select and Mask Cutout. The problem with this, however, is if we zoom in in some areas, there's a little bit of gray that is connecting some of the black lines and things. This bit of gray is just left over from the selection when there are really close edges. But we can fix this using the Brush Tool in the Overlay Blending Mode. First, I'll access the Brush Tool by pressing B and then I'll just choose a soft round brush. Then I want to set the mode from Normal down here to Overlay. So this is just like a layer blending mode, except it's only being applied to our brush as we paint. While it's in this blending mode, essentially we can paint white or black onto our layer mask to remove those in-between colors really easily. So, for example, since I want to remove this little area here, if I paint black onto my layer mask to make it invisible, it's going to turn those semi-visible areas into fully invisible. To make this a little bit easier to understand, let's go and view the layer mask while we work. To do that, just hold Alt or Option and click on the layer mask thumbnail to now view the mask. Anything that is white is fully visible. Anything that is black is fully transparent. Anything that is gray is partially visible. And those are the things that we're trying to remove. As you can see here between these two lines, there's a little bit of gray here. So since I want to remove it, I'll set my foreground color to black while the Brush Tool is still active in the Overlay Blending Mode. And now I can just go and continue to paint over that little area like so. And it's going to remove the in-between, but keep the main details. Another example right down here, we have a little bit of gray connecting the two bits of the beard. I can just go and paint over that and it will automatically remove it. But because of the Overlay Blending Mode, it only targets the gray. It does not affect the black or white. That way, we don't have to worry about painting within the lines, essentially. After you've taken a moment to touch up all of those gray areas, if you see any, we can hold Alt or Option once again to exit the view of that layer mask. And now we can see the nice, sharp result for our final cutout. Now, at this point, if you had a previously colored logo, this is where we would go and add that color back in. The way we can add color is just by using the Paint Bucket Tool, which will allow you to just click on a color and it will automatically fill all of the connected lines with that same color. For example, if I go and access the Paint Bucket Tool nested underneath the Gradient Tool here, I'll set the Mode to Foreground and then the Blending Mode to Normal and Opacity at 100 percent with the Tolerance to 32. I'll then make sure Anti-Alias is enabled and I'll also enable all layers so I can do this non-destructively. Now, the way this tool works is that with your foreground color, let's just say I set it to this red, for example, I'll click OK. Because I have all layers enabled in the Options bar, I'll create a new layer above the graphic. And with that layer selected, I can just go and click over top of any area within the graphic. Anywhere that I click, it's going to sample that color and then fill all of the related colored pixels within that specific shape. So if I went over to the A, it's just going to fill anything that is touching. So you can see how it will transfer over because the H and the A are touching. If you wanted everything to be colored at once instead, rather than doing everything individually, we can disable contiguous, which means that it will apply the color to all of the pixels that match your sample area, regardless of whether they're touching or not. If there's any areas that were missed, we can just click on them to go and fill them in a little bit more like that. But ultimately, you would just go and repeat this process, changing your foreground color to match the original color of your logo and then clicking on the areas to recolor it as you would like on a new layer. So then that way it is non-destructive. But now with that complete, let's quickly look at the side by side results of method one versus method two. Going from left to right, we have our original low res version. After upscaling, we have the first method and then we have our second method. If we zoom in, this is where we're going to see all of the difference here. We have the original. It's obviously very blurry. After the upscale, the edges aren't very sharp. You probably wouldn't use this in any of your designs. Then we have the first method that used the Gaussian blur and the contrast. All the edges look really clean. The little details look pretty crisp to me. And then finally, we have the selected mask version. The edges look a little bit more bold. There's maybe a little bit more gray in the really small details around here. But overall, I would say that these are quite comparable between example one and example two. And both of these look a whole lot better than our original that we started with. Now, I'd be curious to know whether method one or method two works better for you. And if there's any other tricks that I missed in this lesson that you think others might find useful, too. If you haven't already, make sure to grab your free copy of the lesson cheat sheet in the description below. But with that, I'll see you next time.