One for the PhotoShop Guru's!
 

Does anyone know of an easier way of smoothing the edges of scanned or enlarged images?

I'm looking for a way to help my local tattoo studio, they have an extremely large selection of both black and white pictures on paper in their flash art books that they are scanning onto their computer for use both on their website and so they can shrink, stretch and skew the images to fit on their clients. At present whenever an image is enlarged the edges of the image become pixelated and jagged, as you may imagine, having a jagged line instead of a flowing curve wouldnt really do :D At present they are having to enlarge the pictures then smoothe the edges using a PhotoShop paintbrush. Whilst this method is effective it can take a long time and a very steady hand on some of the more complex designs.

Does anyone know of an in-built function in photoshop that can get rid of the pixelation whilst retaining a sharp edge? Or is there a PhotoShop plugin that could achive the same results?

Any help appreciated :)

Hmm... scanning... maybe scan the pictures with a higher resolution? Maybe convert the pictures to a vector format?

2 thoughts, 2 cents,

Thanks for the input, will pass them along :)

Converting the scans is my best tip actually. Tatto motifs should be pretty easy to convert and then they can do whatever they want with them.

Any suggestions on what to use to convert them or does PhotoShop do it? My skills with photoshop consist of scribble, cut and paste :D