Why your photo won't print big
Because a print asks far more of a photo than a screen does, and most photos never had that much detail to give. It's usually fixable — and it's worth knowing which way yours falls before you order rather than after.
A screen is forgiving. A print isn't.
Your phone shows a photo a few inches across, lit from behind, moving as you scroll. Softness hides easily in that. A canvas on a wall is a foot or more across, lit by whatever is in the room, and it doesn't move — someone can stand in front of it and look for as long as they like.
So the same file that looked sharp in your hand can look soft on the wall. That's not a fault in your camera. It's the difference between a picture you glance at and a picture you live with.
Where the detail went
Most photos that are too small didn't start that way.
- Sent through a messaging app. WhatsApp and the rest shrink photos so they send quickly. What arrives is a fraction of what was taken — though there's a way to get the original.
- Saved from social media, which does the same thing, often on top of a shrink that already happened.
- Cropped. If the part you want is a corner of a bigger shot, you've kept a corner's worth of detail.
- Screenshotted, which captures your screen rather than the photo.
- Scanned years ago, at whatever setting the scanner happened to default to.
In every one of those, the detail existed once. It just isn't in the file you're holding.
How to tell before you order
The number you need depends on what you're printing on and how big. A canvas you will see from across a room asks less of a photo than a card you will hold at arm's length — the further away it is, the less detail your eye can resolve, and the more forgiving the print becomes. Printerpix publishes the figures product by product in its image resolution guide.
To use it you need one thing: your photo's width in pixels. Your phone lists it under the image's info, and so does any computer. Compare that number with the one beside the size you want, and you have your answer in a few seconds.
As a feel for the scale: a 30 × 20 inch canvas wants somewhere around 2,250 pixels to look good, and 3,000 to look its best. A small 8 × 10 is happy with about 1,250.
What to do about it
Enhance rebuilds your picture at four times the width and four times the height — sixteen times the area — working from the detail that's already in it.
Run the sum again afterwards and the picture changes completely. A 1,200-pixel photo becomes a 4,800-pixel one, which clears the "best" figure for every canvas size in that guide, including the largest. A photo that could just about manage a greetings card can carry a wall.
It's worth being straight about what that does and doesn't mean. It sharpens what is there and clears the roughness that comes with small files. It doesn't invent: it won't add a face that was never captured, or make a number plate readable that never was. That's deliberate. An enlarged photo of your grandmother should still be your grandmother, not a plausible stranger with her haircut.
When you order a print directly from a PixLab result, the sizes offered already take all of this into account — so if the large canvas options aren't showing, that's what they're telling you.
Leave it until last
If you're also going to repaint the photo, edit something out of it, or change its shape, do all of that first.
Every one of those tools rebuilds the picture at its own size. So a photo you enhanced at the start comes back out at the size of whatever you ran next, and the detail you paid for is gone. Finish the picture, then enhance it, then print.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my photo is big enough?
Find its width in pixels — your phone shows it under the image's info — then compare it with Printerpix's image resolution guide, which lists the figure for each product and size.
Can't I just print it smaller?
You can, and sometimes that's the right call. But "smaller than I wanted" is a compromise you will notice every time you walk past it.
Won't enlarging it make it blurry?
Stretching a photo does exactly that. This doesn't stretch it — it rebuilds it at the larger size from the detail already in the file, which is why the result holds together.
Does it work on old scanned photos?
It's one of the things it's best at. Scans are usually sharp enough and simply too small, which is precisely this problem.
Will it add detail that was never there?
No, and that's on purpose. It works only from what your photo already contains.
What does it cost?
Enhance is charged per run. Current costs for every tool are on the pricing page.