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Enlarging a small photo for a large print without quality loss.

A photo can look perfectly sharp on a monitor and still look noticeably softer when printed at 20 × 30 or 24 × 36 inches. When the source file doesn’t have enough resolution for that print size, enlarging it can make fine details look softer and edges less defined.

Wildlife is a good example. A 12MP DSLR can produce a perfectly usable photograph, but if the subject occupies only a small portion of the frame, cropping can leave only a fraction of the original pixels for the final image. The same thing can happen with a modern high-resolution camera- a 45MP file sounds like plenty, but a heavy crop can quickly reduce the resolution available for a large print.

I’ve tried standard resizing, sharpening, and dedicated AI upscaling tools to deal with this problem over the years. I can get very good results with Lightroom and Photoshop, too, especially when I’m willing to spend more time fine-tuning the image. The same is true of more specialized upscaling tools—the results can be excellent, but getting there sometimes takes a fair amount of hands-on work. So I was a little skeptical when I first tested Aiarty Image Enhancer.

After trying it on a range of photos, I was pleasantly surprised by how clean and natural the results looked. In many cases, I could move the enlarged file into the rest of my editing workflow without additional cleanup. It became a useful option when a cropped or low-resolution photo didn’t have enough pixels for the print size I wanted.

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