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Most images are not meant to be used as wallpapers. Freely available images are either too small or poor quality for this purpose. See how to get the most out of what’s available with the best online tools. High quality online image resizing is the key here and if it’s free all for the better! Read on to find out more.

People say: There already are many beautiful pictures
In principle that’s correct, but relative to the number of existing images, they represent a very small fraction. Try a Google Images search for anything and look at the quality and sizes of the results. How many would you like for your background? The answer is most probably none or, if you’re lucky, a few.

You could also look at user-rated collections of images. Take deviantart.com for example, it has a large number of pictures (42 million). Their all-time ranking has good images in the top 1 million at most. It means that only approximately 2% of the images are worth something. Among them, only a small part have the adequate resolution. So probably less than 0.5% are good wallpaper material.

Still, there are many images to choose from. But, when including the size factor and your personal preference this number decreases a lot.

Fixable image defects
While there theoretically are good quality images that fit your profile finding them is the biggest problem. Because of the large fraction they represent, poor quality images are the most probable result of any search. Many of these are just plain useless, but some of them can be improved.

The most common problems with online pictures are: excessive noise, compression artifacts, wrong focus/blur, over/under exposure, non-fitting color tints, over-sharpening and small size.

Adjusting the adjustable
Photoshop has several features that could come in handy. For each of the defects, here are the solutions (partial sometime):

• Excessive noise: reduce noise filter
• Compression artifacts: reduce noise filter (check the reduce compression artifacts option)
• Inappropriate blur: smart sharpen
• Exposure correction: shadows/highlights adjustments and levels
• Color tints: auto-color, levels on color channels

Photoshop has a problem with upsizing. It introduces to much blur and this cannot be corrected by sharpening. The problem seems to appear most frequently with web-images. Read on and see why.

Why small sizes?
First, images are have low resolution because some of the other defects. How so? Blur and noise disappear when the image is shrank. Photographers know this, and when posting images on the web they resize them first to look better.

Second, it’s because price varies with size. Giving away larger images means giving away more money. This is why professionals tend to stick to very small sizes when putting them on displaying. It increases the exposure without the risk of somebody inappropriately using their works.

There are other reasons for small sizes like the lower resolution of some displays and the limited space available on web-pages to name just a few.

Repairing will-be wallpapers
The techniques already presented can be applied to general purpose images. Because desktops have different aspects (the ratio of the width to height is 5/4, 4/3, 8/5 etc) changing from one to another in some cases is problematic. Multiple methods can be used here: cropping, stretching and non-destructive extension.

• Cropping: When an image has a larger aspect ratio and needs to fit on a smaller ratio screen cutting it is a good solution. Just take the part that’s most interesting and leave the rest out. In this case some of its width is removed.
• Stretching: While theoretically no information is lost, the resulting image is often very distorted.
• Non-destructive extension: The idea is to make a crop. But this time try to remove only the parts of the image that are less informative (blurry regions). For more information look for the seam carving algorithm.

Best photo upsizing is here
All the good stuff has to wait until the end. There is a way to increase resolution without creating blur, noise and also reducing over-sharpening ringing. Overall it’s a great method to enlarge images maintaining their quality. It’s called reshade and you can find it right here at reshade.com. It has a simple to use interface also providing standard cropping and resizing to your own screen resolution. Try the online image resizing engine now!

So, you’ve found a beautiful image that you’d like for your wallpaper. It most probably is small. The nicer images on the web generally are. Here’s why: Many pictures don’t look very good when viewed at their actual size. When down-sized, they do. On sites where users rate these images, they consider the small version first. As a result beautiful images generally come in small sizes. This is not a good thing if searching for wallpapers though. To see the which tools best solve this problem read on. You’ll get a better understanding of the use of online image resizers and photoshop.

Describing the problem

If there just was a way to increase the size of these images and not lose quality. But wait a moment, you could say. It’s not just that, I would also need to crop some part of my favourite images and then resize them to fit my screen as best as they can.
Let’s see, what were the requirements again?

1. Resize the desired image without losing quality to fit at least one dimension of the screen
2. Allow for enlargement of at least 150% with no noticeable degradation in image quality
3. Possibility to crop these images and maintain the aspect ratio of my screen if possible

Solution: Automatically enlarge the images

First, use Photoshop of course:

1. It has resizing
2. Has sharpening
3. Cropping

Well, cropping works nice, a little bit of overhead always opening Photoshop every time you want to try another image, but hey, it works. The only problem here is the resizing part. Photoshop really blurs the whole image even for upsizing to 120% times the size of the original image. That’s very poor quality enlarging. This means that if you find a 800×600 image (an average size for the good quality images on deviantart) it would be too blurry to fit on a standard 1024×768 screen. This looks really bad. Photoshop is the best thing out there, many people could argue, and it couldn’t do that? How so?

Sharpen it

Here’s where the Photoshop expert comes in. But don’t just upsize it, sharpen it too. It will certainly look better, you’ll see. And he’s right, for this very small enlargement, sharpening can do the trick for some images. Not all, but it’s ok. Still, there is no satisfying solution when it comes to resizing images to 130% times their original size, and there are a lot like that.
To make things short, you could try every possible sharpening/upsizing solution for Photoshop and it wouldn’t get much better but for very few images that aren’t even that good looking in the first place.

Specialized upsizing programs

There are some specialized commercial programs out there, most boast to make perfect enlargement at 1000% times the original. It looks just like some marketing hype, and actually, it really is. Sad, but true. Even so, they are better than what you can do in Photoshop. They simply fail to keep their promise when it comes to just 200% times enlargement. Why’s that? It’s because they were targeted for upsizing images for print.
This is still awful. Images that are so small in the original that they would need 1000% enlargement certainly wouldn’t have enough detail to satisfy my wallpapering desires.

Reshading

That’s where reshade online image resizing comes in. It pretty much solves the upsizing problems I mentioned. The algorithm offered here for free makes even a 200% non-degrading enlargement possible. There’s also a crop feature and the possibility to “quick add” an image for resizing (like for pages on del.icio.us).

So, there you have it, your perfect wallpaper, reshaded and maybe touched-up a little in photoshop.

Some common wallpaper sources are mentioned: image search engines, art galleries, wallpaper sites. These are compared based on several factors. The best way to find them is provided below.

Search engines

In the first place you could search for images on Google. But it won’t get you too far.

Search engines index large collections of images. They give relevant results for the keywords you search for. But, that’s not the real problem here, it’s the rating. PageRank, what Google uses, might work well for web-pages, but when it comes to images things change. A highly ranked page may have images from various categories, most of them not displayed for aesthetics.

Art galleries

There are lots of image directories, community reviewed mainly. The most popular that also have a good ranking in-place are presented below. All the characteristics have been established based on the “top ratings” listing on each site. Here’s a table with the caracteristics of several sites.
After careful consideration the best wallpapers you can find are on on deviantart.com. They don’t always come in the best sizes but at least you get a nice experience from viewing beautiful pictures.

Imperfect ranking

On art-galleries an image’s quality is decided first by its thumbnail, than viewed at a medium size and only after that it’s judged by its full size. A low percentage of the users get to see that. This is why even with many votes the rating is not perfect for the full size of the image. This problem is more visible when an image has fewer reviews. It happens especially on flickr where an all-time ranking is not available.

Wallpaper sites

These don’t generally have many images to choose from compared to the previously mentioned sites. Even if the pictures are ranked as best as they could (and this is not the case) there would still be a lack of very good quality images. See here some examples of anime wallpaper sites.

Searching for a wallpaper has it’s trade-offs. You cannot find keyword relevant, good quality, diverse and perfect sized wallpapers all in one source.

Found a beautiful image? See how to resize a wallpaper online with the online image resizer from Reshade.

Other wallpaper sources:

a list of free wallpaper sites
top 5 free desktop wallpaper sites