Need help fighting pixelation so i can jazz up my laptop.

[hadees]

I'm a big fan of Banksy (http://www.banksy.co.uk/menu.html) and as such wanted to make his Fallen Angel image into a big sticker that I could then put on my laptop. The only issue is when I blow up the sticker there is some pixelation going on and I'm not sure how to fix it.

Here is the image (http://i36.tinypic.com/3493od2.jpg), notice the pixelation isn't that bad but i want to make it perfect if i'm going to pay to get it made into a sticker.

http://i36.tinypic.com/3493od2.jpg

I have attached the original unscaled image also if anyone wants to help me out. The size I was going for was 300% increase although i'm wondering if 250% would look better. This is supposed to take up most of the back of my Thinkpad t61p 15.4-inch wide-screen laptop (http://review.zdnet.com/laptops/lenovo-thinkpad-t61p/4505-3121_16-32553560.html). I had thought of doing a custom laptop skin but due to the hinges and leds on the back of the screen I thought it would look weird having most of it covered by a black sticker. Instead i thought it would look cooler to just have a sticker the conformed around the image.

I also wanted to make perfectly clear i am planning on selling these stickers or anything, this is entirely for my own personal use and to make my laptop look kickass.

[johnosullivan]

Make it an alpha channel, then go into the levels on the alpha channel, and play with the settings in there. It should sharpen up the image for you. Bert did it in an episode for ice(Episode 46 - Ice), he make the text, then blurred it, made it an alpha channel, and used the levels to remove the blur.

[arclight]

First I resized in increments of ten percent using bicubic smoother.

I just used the magic wand with a nice big tolerance (uncheck 'contiguous'), inverted the selection and then went in with a big black brush to take care of the edges, which made it easiest for me to keep the cigarette smoke. Using levels or threshold knocked the smoke out of the picture for me.


Got this:

http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/1417/arcstickertestat5.th.jpg (http://img120.imageshack.us/my.php?image=arcstickertestat5.jpg)

[hadees]

That is awesome!!! Is it weird for me to say i love you?

[silentspyder]

If you have illustrator or flash you can also turn it into a vector. The shape isn't that complex so if you play around with the settings on Live Trace or whatever the flash version is called, you should be able to vectorize it. Then you could scale it to whatever size and it'll be as sharp as possible.

[hadees]

damn i know you already helped me out a lot but how hard to you think it would be to turn that smoke into just white but still make it look good. I just found out that because that grey is another color it means i have to pay for 3 colors for the stickers which really raises the price. That really sucks because i like the smoke how it is though. Black and white is the cheapest colors.

[arclight]

Took the quick-n-dirty route again - more magic wand (with about a 5 tolerance) and selected the smoke. Painted it in white then inverted the selection and went over the outline in black. Used a small white brush to try and touch it up a bit.

You're right - it really looks better as grey but probably not worth the extra money. I'm sure someone else could really do it up right.

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/9720/arcstickertest2wf8.th.jpg (http://img152.imageshack.us/my.php?image=arcstickertest2wf8.jpg)