Maintain Picture Quality Microsoft Word Mac

Have you ever tried enlarging an image and then it became blur? I tried many years ago but I never found a way to enlarge it without loosing quality. Some people said that it’s impossible and some even suggested to pay and get them done professionally… Here is an example. I want to enlarge my logo to 200% and here is what it looks like after scaling it to 200%.

Oct 19, 2015 1. Save or convert your image/s into PNG and then insert into Word. Save or convert your image/s into EPS and then insert into Word. Save or convert your image/s into JPEG and then insert into Word. Save the Word document as.docx file and then 5. Save As in PDF format. Compressing Image Files Option By default, MS Word compress images which can reduce the image quality when. How to Resize a Picture in Word 2016 Using Microsoft ® Word you can resize not only pictures, but also text boxes, WordArt, and boxes. If you want, you can also remove unwanted portions of the picture by cropping it. Today, however, we will talk about how to resize a picture in Word.

As you can see, the enlarged image is horrible. I wouldn’t want to use such low quality and blur image on my website. Fortunately, there’s a simple way that I can enlarge images without loosing their quality.

There are actually two different types of image, a vector image and a bitmap image.

A Vector image isn’t an really image at all as you would define it in the traditional sense. Where a standard image you would think of is made up of dots, or pixels, a vector image is a text file made up of a series coordinates and other numbers which defines sets of lines, shapes and curves called vectors. Each of these vectors can then be given extra information such as color, line thickness, infill etc. Because all the information in vector images is simply stored as a set of mathematical numbers, when you modify or resize that image all you’re actually doing changing the properties of the vectors and not trying to stretch or distort anything.

JPG, PNG and GIF are bitmap images and each pixel has it’s own color information which you can see if you zoom right in using a paint program. When you resize a bitmap image, the pixels themselves don’t get stretched but new blank pixels are inserted to increase the size. The paint program then has to make a series of guesses as to what colors to put in those new blank pixels and fill in the gaps. This is why resizing bitmaps can sometimes look quite bad because the guesswork inevitably is never going to be 100% accurate.

The good news is, you can vectorize bitmaps so they can be scaled or enlarged while maintaining quality.

There is a website called Vector Magic which used to offer a free online auto-tracer service to convert bitmap images to vector images. All you need to do is upload your image and they would vectorize it for you. The results are just about the best I have seen for an online service. The bad news is, the service is no longer free which is a real shame, although if you register you get 2 free tokens which counts as 2 free conversions. So if you only have 1 or 2 images to convert, it’s worth a look.

There is a little bit of a workaround if you simply want to resize a logo or simple small image. The idea is to resize the image using the Vector Magic online service, take a screenshot using the Windows Print Screen function (“Prt Scr” on your keyboard) or a screenshot capturing software, and then paste and edit it inside your favorite paint program. While this isn’t ideal and does depend in part on your desktop resolution, it does give you an increased image size without decreasing image quality and with no pixelization.

Once the Vector Magic conversion is complete and you can see the result, press the “Single (1)” button arrowed to switch to single view allowing for a larger viewable area and more space to zoom in and take a screenshot.

Although there are several commercial tools such as Adobe Illustrator, XaraX or Corel Draw, there aren’t many free programs around to easily convert bitmap images to vector images for you. Inkscape is able to work with and convert images to vectors and does a much better job than most of the online converters. To do a conversion download and install Inkscape or run the portable version and load your bitmap into the program.

Press Shift+Alt+B to open the Trace Bitmap window, and then choose Colors or Grey depending on the colors in your image. Untick Smooth and click OK to convert, making sure the image in the main window is selected or it won’t convert. The results are pretty good although still not quite as good as Vector Magic.

There are a couple of limitations when converting from a bitmap image to a vector image. Vector images work best when there are clearly defined edges in the image and there isn’t too much color. Things like logo’s, basic clipart or even cartoon images are things which come out quite well. Bitmaps like photo’s and images without clear edges or with high amounts of detail and different shades of color don’t work well, if at all.

Visit Vector Magic

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Thank You!!!!! Great explanation, and the Vector Magic site was amazing. Gave me exactly what I needed.

Robert Whitmore4 years ago

Legend. I don’t know how many times I’ll use vector magic. Not a whole lot but given the results, if I use it more than twice I’d be more than happy to pay for it.

YOU ARE AWESOME!! THANK YOU!!!

Helen5 years ago

WOW! Thanks sooo much Raymond for your awesome info… I stumbled onto the right page to change my logo size and it worked perfectly. I really appreciate your fantastic info :-)

Another suggestion – the Rasterfarian Image Resize and Clarify Web App. I made this about a month ago to resize a logo for a poster presentation. It works great for logos and graphs, and also for photos for social media profiles, passports, etc. If you photo is a bit blurry or pixelated to start with, there’s not a lot that can be done, but clicking the option that says your image is pixelated helps a bit. Its free – no download or email address is needed.

Good luck and let me know how it works for you!
Site is:
rasterfarian.co

swan6 years ago

well I did your vector magic process but all I got was a vectorised imaged that’s nothing like my image – is there a way to reconvert it to a proper image once its vectorised larger or what?
thanks

yes, but you need online manual vectorization service ( twitter.com/VectorizeImages ). Online vector conversion tools can handle only very simple images.

Milosh10 years ago

Thank you very much!

THIS IS AWESOME!!!

anonymous11 years ago

Nice info man! Thanks ^^b

Thank you so much! I wish I would have known about this long ago. So many headaches could have been avoided, lol. I’m off to enlarge some images now. =D

ch0c0la11 years ago

ha. i’ve never known such a great app.
thanks for sharing, man..

the best advice and i manage to solve my 3 days headache. i rate you 100% good

eapple11 years ago

THANK YOU SOOO MUCH! You’re a genius and a lifesaver.

Maintain Picture Quality Microsoft Word Mac

Thanks

Q11 years ago

thank you for the information. this is great tool !!!
News are / will be spread out

Wow, great tip. This will be very useful – presentations for work, digital pictures…

namzer012 years ago

yeah! reshade works even fine for me! (for Anime fans, It can even enlarge any Anime Image!!!) Wahooo!!!
This thing is just for drawings(WMF style)

I have tried the other site you mentioned: reshade.com. It works a lot better for photos than vectormagick.

chingawa you could use that ;)

KK12 years ago

nice post…

Superb Information. Keep it up…!

praval_200012 years ago

great information thanks verymuch.

Yep that site rocks i use that but thanks for telling.

Maintain picture quality microsoft word mac software

Mangalman12 years ago

Oh only if I had known about this few minutes before.
I wouldn’t have placed a blurred one in my page.
Thanks anyways.good job.

hi, thanks for this useful information.

mark12 years ago

Nice! I was going to get a software to do this, but this looks better.

Thanks Raymond. Very useful website

anonymous12 years ago

Great article.

Thanks
I’ll try

Dipin12 years ago

Thanks Ray very useful information. I thought it is impossible.

Very useful info thanks Ray

Johan12 years ago

Thanks! :D

This is bookmarked. ;)

Thanks for this useful piece of information!

tacitus12 years ago

That´s a very great option! Thanks

Maintain Picture Quality Microsoft Word Mac Software

Maintain Picture Quality Microsoft Word Mac Torrent

With a vector source file, is it possible to create a high quality graphic letterhead in Word? No matter what format or resolution I make the logo image for the header, it ends up low quality/pixel-y when printed. What should my format/resolution/workflow be?

The client wants to be able to print letterhead documents on demand (rather than having the letterhead printed, and then loading the printed paper into into the office printer). So I think I'm stuck with Word. The previous letterhead was all system-font text, so there were no quality issues. The new logo is a text-based image, and the quality has been lousy at every resolution I've tried importing. I've tried jpg, png-24, eps, and tif. I've even tried changing the automatic compression settings in Word, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
Does Word always compress the image? Is there a way to avoid this? Does it matter if the image is resized in Word?

posted by monkeystronghold to Computers & Internet (13 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

jpg, png, and tif are all bitmap formats. You don't want that.
EPS can have bitmap or vector components. Without knowing how you created the eps file, it's impossible to know which it is. If you created the eps file from a jpg, png, or tif, then you're still dealing with a bitmap, obviously.
The way to do what you want is to create the logo in Illustrator, and then export it as a PDF. You'll then be able to add the PDF to your word document and it should come out high quality. The PDF will contain the vector graphics from Illustrator.
posted by alms at 10:48 AM on August 2, 2012

If you zoom in on the area in your Word doc where the graphic is, does it look pixelated?
I think this may be more to do with the printer settings than the graphic itself. Any graphic 150dpi or better should print nicely enough for letterhead but your printer will treat graphics and text differently so you may have to print using the photo settings or high quality settings in your printer set up.
posted by merocet at 11:00 AM on August 2, 2012

Does it matter if the image is resized in Word?
Very much so, in my experience. You want to insert it into Word at a massive size and then only shrink it down, never enlarge it.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:03 AM on August 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

See if you can convert the vector format into a EMF file, which Word should handle as vector.
posted by wongcorgi at 11:10 AM on August 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

I do this by exporting from Illustrator (or whatever vector program you use) as a Windows Meta File (WMF) file. In Illustrator, choose 'Export as' from the file menu, not 'Save as'.
As per what wongcorgi says about EMFs (a quick google search informs me they're related), WMFs are handled as vectors within Word.
posted by springbound at 11:34 AM on August 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

Two things: 1) make sure you're not increasing the size to more that 100% in Word regardless of the filetype of your graphic; 2) check your photo compression settings in Word.
If you have the recent version of Word (with the stupid ribbon menus), go to File, Options, and then in the dialog box, click 'Advanced' on the left. Scroll down until you see the 'Image Size and Quality' options and put a checkmark next to 'Do not compress images in file' and then make sure the default res is set to 220 ppi (the highest option).
See if that helps.
posted by Eicats at 12:07 PM on August 2, 2012

p.s. Word is very finicky about .eps images, in my experience. I have found that using a .wmf or .png works pretty well.
posted by Eicats at 12:09 PM on August 2, 2012

alms: you can't insert PDF into Word :(
posted by Eicats at 12:13 PM on August 2, 2012

WMF and EMF are the only vector formats that the Office products can handle reliably. I third the suggestion to use them.
posted by zsazsa at 1:32 PM on August 2, 2012

You can insert PDF graphics into Word, at least on the Mac. Word does occasionally randomly decide to rasterize them, though, and it does so at an ugly coarse resolution. Are there any transparency effects in your letterhead? I've found that those tend to trigger rasterization.
posted by irrelephant at 2:57 PM on August 2, 2012

Thank you all for the help. WMF/EMF did the job. I had never heard of either format.
posted by monkeystronghold at 9:59 PM on August 2, 2012

Elcats, yes you can, at least on the Macintosh. I do it on a regular basis. I'd be happy to provide more details, but it seems like the op solved the problem with WMF/EMF.
posted by alms at 4:09 AM on August 3, 2012

Maintain Picture Quality Microsoft Word Mac Update

Alms, wouldn't surprise me that the Mac version will do it; but if you know of a way to make it work on a PC, let me know! I end up having to save PDF files as jpegs for Word...
posted by Eicats at 1:26 PM on August 24, 2012

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