In this week’s free episode of Deke’s Techniques, Deke explains the fine art of upsampling a layered composition. When you make an image larger in this way, you’re instructing Photoshop to make new pixels. And how those new pixels are created will effect the quality of your new, larger image.

Although the new Image Size dialog box has a wonderful resizable preview window—which will give you an exact prediction for upsampling a simple flat photograph—the preview contained therein is going to be wildly inaccurate for a layered file with myriad types of layers.

This misleading preview happens because Photoshop “mentally” flattens the image before calculating the preview, whereas, in the real upsampling process each individual layer is considered differently.

In this movie, Deke explains how each of these layers responds to upsampling, and how to get around some of the effects:

Rebuilding the horizontal pattern after upsampling is covered in this week’s exclusive movie all on its own. If you aren’t a member of lynda.com, you can get a free week’s trial to check it out—and all the rest of Deke’s Techniques—at lynda.com/deke.