I feel pretty dumb, I am a reasonably experienced and competent photographer, but for some reason I can't figure this out.
I need to prepare a sheet of 2" x 2" photos of my wife for a visa application. I take the picture at high resolution (about 3600 x 2700) and cut and paste it into my graphics program of choice (Paint.net). Of course the picture is gigantic, PDN says it is 50.7 x 38 inches, but that's no problem, I grab a corner of the picture and drag it down to 2" x 2", copy and paste it 19 times and voila!, I have an 8.5 x 11" page with 20 pictures on it.
And the resolution is crap. The re-sizing of the image is wrecking it, making it all fuzzy and jaggy.
Using the resizing tool in PDN gives the same result. Using resizing software (PictureResizer.exe, a free utility) gives the same result. Resizing seems to be the kiss of death.
What approach do I take to create crisp little 2" x 2" prints? Surprisingly, importing the full-res original picture into Microsoft Word, then dragging to re-size it to 2x2 gives better results than my graphics program, but the picture still looks better on my monitor than on paper. Some (most? all?) of the problem may be that I am printing with an inexpensive color laser printer (2400 x 600 dpi) on white bond paper. I doubt that I can find any of the special color laser photo paper here in Ajijic.
I can't help but think that my basic approach is wrong. Should I shoot from a distance at low-res on the camera so I can crop out just the head and shoulders and not have to re-size? That doesn't sound right. Maybe my Paint.net graphics program is the wrong tool? There is probably some simple, basic concept I am overlooking here, but I don't know what it is.
tanstaafl.
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"