Increasing Resolution and Reducing Size of an Image in Java

Question

When I first asked this, I included as much information as I could, since I never know what will help someone if they can give m a solution, but from the answers, it seems I

Answer 1

No, if you take an 8x10 72dpi image and ask for a 200% zoom you'll get a 16x20 at 36 dpi. You can't magically increase image resolution.

What counts is the total number of pixels in the image. The stated DPI is just what the DPI will be at a specific size. Take your 8x10 image at 72dpi. It has 576x720 pixels. If you zoom to 200% you still have the same number of pixels, but now they'll be spread out over twice the linear dimensions, meaning the individual pixels will be bigger. Some software will attempt to increase resolution by interpolating pixels, i.e. creating new pixels by averaging the nearest neighbors. This can give the impression of higher resolution but the image does not contain any more data. It always has the effect of softening the image, especially any sharp edges or lines.

If you reduce the size of an image without resampling, you do increase the printed or displayed resolution, but the image gets smaller. For the same image, increasing the DPI to 144 will reduce the image size to 4x5.

Answer 2

This is tricky because, like so much in Java, you can't just access something in a simple way. Java does not keep track of DPI, but it does use dots per millimeter. Also, another part that is confusing is that you cannot change this kind of information in an image, or in a BufferedImage. You can only change this information when you are writing a BufferedImage out through an ImageWriter.

I was able to do this. As I said, I could specify the zoom on the image that was returned to me. No matter what zoom level, the output was 72 DPI. My goal was 300DPI. I specified a zoom level of 400%. So, on an 8" wide image of 72 DPI, that returned to me a 32" image of 72 DPI. All I had to do was specify a DPI of 288 (72 x 4) to override the default 72 DPI I was dealing with and then when it was written out, the image had the same number of pixels, but was considered to be done at 288 DPI rather than 72 DPI.

Here's a code snippet:

//Assumed there's already an ImageWriter iw

ImageWriteParam writeParam = writer.getDefaultWriteParam();
ImageTypeSpecifier typeSpecifier =
       ImageTypeSpecifier.createFromBufferedImageType(BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
IIOMetadata metadata = writer.getDefaultImageMetadata(typeSpecifier, writeParam);
if (metadata.isReadOnly() || !metadata.isStandardMetadataFormatSupported()) {
    continue;
}

// Set Parameters and info

int DPI = 72 * scaling/100;
double dotsPerMilli = 1.0 * DPI / 10 / 2.54;
double checkDots = 1.0 * 144 / 10 / 2.54;
System.out.println("Dots per inch: " + DPI + ", DotsPerMilli: " + dotsPerMilli + ",
    CheckDots = " + checkDots);
IIOMetadataNode root = new IIOMetadataNode("javax_imageio_1.0");
IIOMetadataNode horiz = new IIOMetadataNode("HorizontalPixelSize");
horiz.setAttribute("value", Double.toString(dotsPerMilli));
IIOMetadataNode vert = new IIOMetadataNode("VerticalPixelSize");
vert.setAttribute("value", Double.toString(dotsPerMilli));
IIOMetadataNode dim = new IIOMetadataNode("Dimension");
dim.appendChild(horiz);
dim.appendChild(vert);
root.appendChild(dim);
metadata.mergeTree("javax_imageio_1.0", root);

// From here, just write out file using an ImageOutputStream

final ImageOutputStream stream = ImageIO.createImageOutputStream(outFile);
System.out.println("Output file: " + outFile);
try {
    writer.setOutput(ImageIO.createImageOutputStream(outFile));
    writer.write(metadata, new IIOImage(image_to_save, null, metadata),
    writeParam);
} catch (Exception e) {
    System.out.println("Caught exception " + e + " when trying to write out
        file.");
    System.exit(0);
} finally {
    stream.close();
}