Photoshop CS3 is used to demonstrate this tutorial but can also be used in some earlier versions.
It’s often disappointing to find that many of the brushes freely available on the web are low resolution and therefore not suitable for using on a layout. This method, using Paths, can allow you to substantially increase the size of a brush or clipart image with certain characteristics. For this technique to be successful the image must have well defined edges, though it may even still not work with very poor quality brushes. It will not be successful with a brush that relies on varying opacity for details. It will likely take a trial and error approach to determine brushes which can be successfully resized this way.
Create a 12x12 inch canvas, fill with white and then create a new layer.
With Layer 2 selected, choose a brush, and stamp on your canvas.
This particular brush is 714 pixels and you can see that it is too small to be of use on a 12x12 layout, it is barely an inch wide.
If I try to increase the diameter of the brush to 2500 pixels and apply you can see that the brush loses its crispness and the resulting pixelation is very obvious at Actual Pixel view of the feet of the larger stamped image. You get the same loss of quality if you use the transform tool to scale the image.
Use Edit> Undo or CTRL+Z to delete the larger stamp.
Chose the Move tool from the tools palette and CTRL + click on the Layer 2 thumbnail, so that the marching ants appear around the brush.
Create a new layer using the New Layer icon on the layers palette and then hide the contents of Layer 2. This leaves just the marching ants.
With Layer 3 selected, switch to the Paths Palette and click the “Make workpath with selection” icon
Now go to Edit> Transform Path> Scale
Hold down SHIFT to maintain the proportions and use the diagonal handle to resize the image.
Choose the Move tool and apply the change.
Right click on the workpath layer and choose Fill Path
Choose from the Contents options available – in this case Foreground which is at the default black. Make sure Anti Alias is checked and there is no feather radius under Rendering.
The path then fills with the black. Deselect the path layer by clicking anywhere in the path palette
Unlike simply increasing the brush diameter, the enlarged image retains crisp clear edges. It has also been dramatically scaled from roughly 2.5 inches high to almost 12 inches high.
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