Size confusion

Question

I doing my first business card. The printer told me to make sure that I do the image at 300 ppi so I've set up a blank work page at 3 1/2 x 2 inches and or 1050 x 600 pixels at 300ppi.
I've set it up this way so that what ever other images I bring into this work space, I will be able to see immediately if they are large enough or not to work on this business card.
Now, one of the images that the client wants brought into this work space is 329 x 242 pixels at 72 ppi and he wants it to be almost the full width of the card because it is a logo. Now immediately, I'm thinking, this is just going to be too small.
Here's what's really confusing me, as a test, I selected the whole 329 x 242 pixel, 72 ppi image and dragged it into the business card work space thinking for sure that when I dragged it in, I would immediately see it's visual size shrink dramatically. This did not happen. It dragged into the work space without shrinking at all even though it was a 72 ppi image being brought into a 300 ppi image.
Then, just to try and figure things out, I went back to the 329 x 242 image and changed the resolution to 300 ppi without resampling, which of course made the size numbers for the image go down dramatically but when I went ahead with the resizing, THIS DIDN'T SHRINK THE IMAGE EITHER.
This is version III. I could almost swear that when I did this exact same type of thing before, with version II, I would immediately see the dragged in, less resolution image shrink, which only makes sense.
Somebody set me straight here.
Confused.

Answer 1

As Colin suspected, you are a tiny bit confused about the resolution issue. The ppi in this particular case isn't important; you only need to pay attention to the number of pixels present in each of the two images. The image of the logo is going to transfer to the new document pixel for pixel. I see now what you were trying to describe, and it was working the way it should. So, you're right; your bigger challenge will be increasing the pixel dimensions of the logo in order to get a good print.
How detailed is the logo? My son had created one for a business we had that was really quite forgiving and would have resized well. I'd suggest before you do anything else that you experiment (on a copy, of course!) Open the logo and resize it with Resampling checked. PSE 3.0 now has two new options for resampling; one is Bicubic Smoother, and the other is Bicubic Sharper. And I'll be doggoned if I can remember what the consensus is for which one to use when resampling upwards and which to use when resampling downwards! Eeeek!
You get the copy made, and I'll go off and see if I get lucky and find the answer. When I do, I'll repost, or maybe someone else will know which is which off the top of their head and post the answer. Or, if I'm too slow for you, try using one resizing option on one copy and the other option on another copy. This might require you do a test print, unless it looks so bad on the screen that you can tell right away. Unfortunately, screens are more forgiving that printers. :(
Resizing might not work, in which case recreating it will be the only alternative. Let's hope you get lucky.
Edit: That was easier than I thought: "For upsizing your images, check Resample and Choose Bicubic Smoother from the Bicubic drop-down menu. Try not to upsize more than 50% for a quality image."
Good luck, and let us know how it's going. In your case, you'll have to go beyond that 50% rule. You might want to add one more step to this. Don't do the entire upsize at once; tackle it in increments of 10% at a time, but still use the Bicubic Smoother option. You've got a long way to go, so it still might not work, but it won't take you long to find out.
Edit #2!: A couple more thoughts. The size discrepancy you were seeing (or not seeing, depending on your perspective) may have been because the View percentage on the two images was different. But that's not important at this point.
Does this person have anything else the logo has been used on that's already been printed? If so, you might be able to get yourself a decent scan at a higher resolution.
And, last (whew!), if you DO wind up having to recreate this logo, make sure you do it in a nice high res in case he comes back wanting something bigger than a business card made! It's always easier to downsize a big image than to upsize a small one. :)
I think I'm through now.