How can I enlarge the thumbnail pic beside the screen name ?

The member's pictures shown by their screen name in the right column are interesting, but I can't enlarge them to see any detail. Can it be done?

No the size is limited to keep page loads small, some forums don't even allow them for that reason.

Technically you could enlarge it with software but all you get is big blurry image.

Even with decent software, this is as good as it gets.

There's plug-ins for most image applications for doing this that will give you better results, Genuine Fractals is the most common one but it's $$$. It doesn't add detail however as that is impossible no matter what you see on TV. What it does do is examine the images for contrasting edges and will keep them defined so you don't get the soft blurriness.

For a poor mans version you can use any decent image editing application and scale the image in steps using bi-cubic as the method. In between each step use a noise filter program like neat image. Neat image will remove the softness and sharpen the edges, end result is pretty sharp image closely comparable to the $$$ scaling plug-ins.

Small images like the Avatars are really tough under any circumstances.

I'd like to see Genuine Fractals work sometime. What I have "resamples" the photo. It simply makes as many pixels as you want where there used to be one. It does not take into account the pixel next to the one resampled. Gosh, I just looked, Genuine Fractals is only $250ish. Hmmmmm The software I'm using was over ten times that!

Feeling ripped off Freddy?

Freddy wrote: Hmmmmm The software I'm using was over ten times that!

It's plug-in for photoshop. You need photoshop for it to work. There's even plug-ins for the plug-in... lol

Some interesting samples of what you can do after its been scaled using Genuine Fractals. : http://actions.home.att.net/dSLR_Fractal_Sharpen.html

Note the time required for processing the images.


Having said that you can results you are getting with free software like the Gimp. The is no equivalent to Genuine Fractals for the gimp though or any other software that I'm aware of.

stoker-man wrote:Feeling ripped off Freddy?

Not at all! The software I have is "Flexi Pro". It's the top of the line software for design and cutting vinyl with a computer driven servo motorized machine. It also prints to large format printers for banners and exterior durable signs. The "resampling" is just one part of the software. I also have "Omega" software made by Gerber. List price on them is $4,200 and $3,600. They have paid for themselves many times over. Photoshop works primarily with bitmap images, whereas Flexi and Omega work with vectors as well as bitmaps.