Creating Desktops From Undersized Images

Alright, let's say you have a picture or, in this case, a painting which is a lower resolution than your screen. (The painting is "Iceberg & Humpback Whales" by Robert Bateman (see links)) Rather than stretching and distorting it, you can just layer the same picture in a document of the proper size (for my computer that's 1024x768).

1. Open the picture you want to edit. Select all and copy.













2. Create a new document to match your screen size, and paste the picture (it will automatically go right to the middle). Paste another--they are now both in seperate layers.













3. Go to Edit, Transform and choose Scale. Holding down the Shift key to constrain proportions, drag the corners so the picture fills the entire page. You have now resized one of the images you just pasted. Take the layer you just edited and drag into underneath the other. So far, your work should look something like this.













4. Select the larger picture and at the top of the Layers palette, slide the Opacity down to about 50-60%. If you want, you can now go to the Filter menu and choose one that appeals to you--I used Gaussian Blur. (Radial Blur with the Zoom option is also very cool).

5. Finally, you can select the layer which contains the smaller image and choose a layer style. There are several ways to do this. 1) Click on the little black circle with an "f" in it at the bottom of the layers palette and choose a style like Outer Glow, Drop Shadow, Bevel & Emboss, Stroke--whatever. 2) Use the Layers dropdown menu and go to Styles. Just adjust the settings until you're satisfied and you've got it! Here's my finished product.













Hope that will be useful--it sure has been for me. I have tons of paintings on my computer, and this provides a way for me to make them look good as desktops.