scaling up a picture, help

[DarkHorse]

i have a picture of a helicopter, side view,
and i want to make it bigger,, a certain dimension between the main rotor and the tail rotor,

i have photoshop elements,
can it be done?
and print out the 20 or whatever sheets of regular 8.5x11 paper,
and tape them togeather for the enlaged print?

how can i do this??

thanks
john

[venchka]

Very carefully.

[DarkHorse]

lol,,but how???

[venchka]

Here's what I would do...

Insert the JPEG file into AutoCad.
Scale the JPEG to whatever size I needed. The distance between the rotors in your case.
Create a grid and crop marks.
Print windows from AutoCad on the largest paper my printer can handle. A roll would be nice. 17" high x whatever long. Or letter size if that's all you have.
That's how I would do it. YMMV.

[hue-e]

sizing up has a tendency to lower the quality of the image. there's no way around it whatsoever. You can however print large format at lower resolutions because they don't require the same amount of pixels as standard prints.

as for doing this in photoshop, yes, you can. just go to image/image size and make it the size/resolution you want. make sure to click resample at the bottom. note: don't make your resolution any lower than 175. On an ink jet printer, that's about as low as you can go before it looks terrible.

the rest is just using your print dialog box, when you go to print, look for "tiling" options. it will help you set overlap, etc, then it'll basically print you a big puzzle.

have fun, these don't always work out that great. personally, I'd hit up any place with a plotter and do it all in one sheet.

[venchka]

It helps to know what distance you need between the rotor hubs. Inches? Feet? How large is the original file? RAW or JPEG? How much quality do you need in the finished mosaic? All of the above affects the end product.