How can I save this photo (the firefighters raising the flag) to be the wallpaper on my computer? I saved it, but it’s so small, it has to be tiled, and I don’t like how it looks. How can I enlarge it, without distorting it, so it’s just that photo on the screen?
Thanks!
(I must have this one…hubby and I are both volunteer firefighters)
(Mods: I posted this same question in a MPSIS thread {“This pic says it all”} but then decided to put it here since it’s a question. Hope that’s okay.)*
Long answer:
I assume you’re running Windows. Some versions of Windows have a “stretch” option for displaying your wallpaper - go to Control Panel > Display > Background tab and look for the options Center/Tile/Stretch. IIRC, however, the stretch function force-fits the image to the montior’s dimensions, so a tallish picture such as yours would get pretty badly distorted, and for small images, blows up the original pixels to big, ugly blocks. If you have an image-editing program such as Photoshop, you can go through a couple of iterations of up- and down-sizing the image to remove the blockiness, but you’ll end up with a fuzzier picture.
Like Philistine said, it’s pretty small. Blowing it up will produce a pretty grainy image.
Second, the aspect ratio is a problem. Even if you did enlarge it, once it was big enough to fill your screen top-to-bottom, it wouldn’t be nearly wide enough. You’d have to either crop it to 4:3 aspect ratio (which would ruin the shot, IMO), or live with large blank spaces on either side of the picture.
Actually, I just took it in Photoshop, blew it up to 600 pixels high, and then expanded the canvas size to 800 pixel width, leaving the photo in the middle - the sides I left black. I’m going to email you the file, which should be useable as a desktop without distortion. It looks…OK - it’s blurry, but recognizable.
Okay, thanks everyone.
I knew the format was too tall and skinny for a good desktop photo, but I have it centered in the middle with my icons on the sides. It looks good.
I’m going to leave my computer on so MrKinsey will see it when he comes home.
Thanks!
In case you’re still interested, I just heard on the radio that the Bergen County Record (where the photographer who took the picture works) has larger sizes available on their website for download and to order as a print: http://www.northjersey.com/index/groundzerospirit.html
