OK, given the all-digital-art-is-evil-when-applied-to-photography nature of many of the photographers on this site, it might not be a popular subject, and I might end up being cyber-stoned as a heretic, but here goes anyway...
If you're like me and have a sub-megapixel camera similar to my old Sony Mavica FD-91 but you want a print that looks better at a print size bigger than 3x5, you can try tweaking the image like I describe here or that John Setzler goes into greater detail describing here, but these can really only take you so far before you start to have to concede to the digital gods.
For those of you with newer versions of Photoshop (at least 6 and 7 and maybe earlier versions), you might want to try playing with the art history brush. Now understand, you WILL NOT end up with a photograph at the end of you art history brush session. But you might end up with a beautiful piece of artwork that CAN be printed up to 20x30 inches from your favorite little sub-megapixel image.
I've been messing around with this and have got what I think are some beautiful results. It does take some playing, though, to get something that you'll think looks good.
I'm not claiming that the following is the best I could have done with the particular image -- it's only meant to be an example of how you can up the size on the image...
This was the original photo, at the original size. I pulled it from a photo disk that claimed to have "2200 High-Quality Stunning Photos" -- uh-huh -- high quality, perhaps, but not high resolution....
And this is a crop of a portion of the image at 100% after I resized, painted, and then let just a hint of the original image show through. (There is also some saturation tweaking, levels adjustment, sharpening, etc. going on.)
You may or may not like the results. But if you're like me and have some images you really like, but simply can't print at anything remotely approaching a decent quality, you might try this route. I've done so with a couple of images which I then had printed at ezprints.com and have been EXTREMELY pleased with what I got back.
If you have any questions about how to use the brush, feel free to ask.
Edited some spelling mistakes...
Message edited by author 2003-01-13 16:28:18.
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