Improving Photo Quality

Question

I have imported a photo which is 227 pixels wide by 321 pixels high. Apparently the quality of this image is too poor to have the photo made into a 4 x 6 print. Is there any way to improve the quality of this image in I Photo 09?
Thank you,
C.D.

Answer 1

Like TD said. Apple gives a low resolution warning when you are below 600 x 900 pixels for a 4x6 print:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1135
This works out to 150 pixels per inch (ppi). (This is a minimum resolution, a decent resolution is 220 ppi, and the rule of thumb is 300 ppi.) Your image would print at 321/6 -> 54 ppi, so you are way off the mark as TD said.
You can use something like PhotoShop Elements to resize the image to something like 600 x 900, but it cannot make detail appear out of nowhere, so the result will not look very sharp, it will appear pixellated.
It might be better to split the difference and use an image processing program to double the image to 454 x 642, and then print it at 3 inches by 4.3 inches leaving quite a bit of white border on the 4 x 6 print.
Of course, only you can decide what is acceptable or not. My MIL is very proud of prints she makes at the lowest size and quality setting on her camera (with lots of pixellation and jpeg artifacts), which I would never dream of showing to anybody else, unless it was a real photo of Bigfoot or something. 8^)