Help! Livercake, Nicola & any other camera savvy COLers

[SJP]

Trying to get a photo of my friends dogs (without her knowing as its to be a bday present).

Her son has used a point & shoot digital camera to take the pic.  When I used the pic to create the present I was told:

Low resolution image, this may result in poor quality

Can I do anything with this existing photo? 

I will get my daughter to actually put the photo on when she gets home from work for y'all to look at as I cannot do it 

[Helen]

hmmm doubt whether there's much you can do with this - what is the present?   

[SJP]

A jigsaw (from Bonusprint).

Do you think its worth me asking him to take a picture with his phone camera?

[Helen]

it needs to be quite big then - that's probably why the image won't work when it's blown up.

Send it to me and I can see if I can do anything - maybe if you chose something with her image on it quite small then it could work 

have a look at the photo gifts on Snapfish and Photobox too, cos there may be something different there that would accept the image 

[SJP]

Thank you Helen I will send it across.....

I tried to put it on a keyring and had the same resolution quote 

[SJP]

Emailed you.

[cdpops]

 if it does say this and you can't improve the quality, don't do it. The end result is rubbish the jigsaw will be very blurred even though the picture on the box looks great (made this maistake at Christmas)

[hblower]

the lower the resolution the original picture was taken in the poorer quality any copy will be.  the more you blow it up the worse it will look i am afraid. what will happen is that it will look very blurrry and pixelated or dotty so that instead of seeing  pciture you will see lots of dotty.  Wtih better qaulity cameras you get more dots per square cm or inch.  this is what gives pictures better quality. 

if you can get a better picture with a camera phone or other camera then i would otherwise you may find the jigsaw looks quite poor.  just for comparison i have a nikon D50 and while this is by no means the highest resolution camera you can get it has a resolution of 5megal pixels or 5 milllion pixels per square.  the normal image sixe this shoots in is A3.  A phone camera is normally 3.2 or 5 megapixels.  This will give a reasonable picture.

[SJP]

Thank you everyone for your help.  Livercake managed to increase the resolution, but alas it still says the same poor quality quote!

I think I'm going to have to take my camera and go out with her and the dogs and just click away and hope for the best OR get her a different present