Hey hello hi!

Since I keep getting questions about how to make stuff so big without going blurry I thought I should make a thing for that. So here. I’m sure there’s other ways to do it, but this is just for Photoshop because yeah… That’s what I do my stuff in. :P

Educational stuff and things under the readmore so I don’t clog your dash up.

Say you’ve got a pixellated GIF you wanna make bigger. As an example we’ll use this GIF of Dave being the coolest kid on the block.

The sprites I butchered to make this GIF are the same size as they are in the actual comic, obviously. But if you want a HUGE ASS version for whatever reason, you can sometimes have trouble with it blurring.

Here’s that GIF blown up to 500x698 (Tumblr seems to stop agreeing with GIFs if you go past 500 width).

If you’re cool with the blurring you can just leave it there, but I’m not a fan so instead I fuck around with the settings a bit.

What you wanna do is go into General Settings (it might be somewhere else in earlier versions of Photoshop so you might need to go hunting), find “Image Interpolation”, and change it from Bicubic Automatic or whatever else it’s set to, to Nearest Neighbor (preserve hard edges):

Then scale it up again and it’ll look something like this.

Crystal clear and stuff!

Depending on the file, you might find that even when you’ve set it to Nearest Neighbor, it still gets blurry when you scale it up. If this is the case, you’ll need to right click each layer and convert each one to a Smart Object before scaling it up. That should stop any blurriness from happening.

Also note that this obviously only works with images that aren’t blurred to begin with. If you try to scale up a SBaHJ comic like this, it’ll look the same except with the cleanest JPEG artifacts you’ve ever seen. All it’s doing is scaling up every pixel into giant, crisp squares instead of giving it a blur when it gets bigger than its original size.

Hopefully that helps. Tune in next time and I’ll teach you how to eat a french fry. Just one though. You’re on your own for the rest of the bag.