In our latest post, Castle’s Head of Creative, Pete Richardson will be guiding you through the process of how to increase the resolution of an image.

Image resolution is a very important aspect when it comes to websites. The visuals of a website not only need to match up to what the text reads, but it also needs to be aesthetically pleasing for the traffic on your website. This can however be at the detriment of a website. In this post, I will show you how to increase the resolution of an image.

What is image resolution?

Image resolution is how many pixels are found within the image itself. For example, this can range from 72 pixels up to 300 pixels. The resolution and clarity of an image come when there are more pixels in a particular image – so the more the pixels, the clearer the image will be.

A blurry image demonstrating what is image quality and how to increase the resolution of an image.

How does image resolution benefit and hinder a website?

The resolution of images can benefit a website should the images be a smaller resolution size. The resolution size of an image can affect certain things like the speed of a website. Should your images be rather large file sizes, this can drastically slow down the loading of a page – potentially resulting in traffic leaving the website. In order to combat this so your website speed increases drastically – we suggest using websites such as TinyPNG. TinyPNG will allow you to drastically decrease the image file size while keeping the sharpness and quality of the image.

If you are using Photoshop to resize your images, you always want to start with a larger resolution. If you start with a lower resolution and increase it, this is when you will start to pick up on things such as blurriness and pixelation. So, if you are a marketing agency, for example, you don’t want large resolution sizes as this can slow down your website, but you also want to make sure you have changed the resolution in a way that won’t hinder the quality of an image.

A wooden desk with an Apple computer with Adobe Photoshop open showing how to increase the resolution of an image.

How to increase the resolution of an image?

If you’re looking for ways on how to increase the resolution of an image, you can use websites or tools that will do it for you, can re-scan your image without the need of having to take a new image. You can increase the resolution of a digital image; however, you will see pixelation and a drop in quality to the overall image.

 If you want to change the size and resolution of an image using Photoshop. A simple way to do this is to:

  • Select File > Open and select your image.
  • Select Image > Image Size.
  • In the image dialog box, uncheck the resample image box.
  • In the resolution field, enter your desired resolution.
  • Select OK and accept changes.

There are also a number of online websites that you can use. Picsart for example, allows you to resize images, without losing the quality. Whereas TinyPNG only allows you to change the file size – not the overall size of an image. Picsart also allows you to increase the resolution of low-quality images. This saves time having to look for a replacement image altogether as you already know that this is the image you want to use for the page, so this will make your desired image sharper.

Another one that we recommend is letsenhance. Letsenhance is similar to Piscart in that you can also resize images without losing quality, as well as increasing the resolution of low-quality images. Letsenhance allows you to also balance the brightness and colours of your images so you can be in control of the colours that you want to provide more of a ‘pop’ too.

There are plenty of tools that will show you how to increase the resolution of an image. Whether it be software that you have installed like Adobe Photoshop, as well websites like the ones mentioned above. If you are still having difficulties though, see one of our earlier posts regarding how to increase the resolution of an image without photoshop.