How to upscale images with minimal quality loss?

I have this one image that I need to scale up by about 30%, but whenever I try to resize it, I just end up with that annoying pixelation effect everywhere.
Now, I've heard whispers that if you use a more recent version of Photoshop—specifically with some newer AI-driven tools—you might be able to pull this off while keeping the quality relatively intact.
Does anyone happen to know if there's any truth to that? If so, how exactly does one go about doing it—or perhaps there's some other software out there that handles this better?

You can find those options in pretty much any decent image editor once you move past the basic ones; you don't actually need Photoshop for this since Gimp and several other free tools handle it just fine. I'd suggest selecting bicubic interpolation when resizing, and if you're saving as a JPG, try to keep the quality at 80% or higher, though using a lossless format like a TIFF with LZW compression is probably a safer bet.

swifttinker40 said:I have an image that I need to upscale by about 30%, but whenever I try to resize it, it just ends up looking all pixelated.
I heard there might be a newer tool in the latest version of Photoshop that can handle this with minimal quality loss.
Does anyone know if that's actually true? If so, how do I do it? Or maybe there’s some other software out there that works better.

ETO. It happened.
Back when they were teaching at MIT that they don't waste time on useless fluff like thermodynamics and instead focus strictly on practical applications, I honestly thought students would try to take a tiny image, blow it up, and then be completely baffled as to why they couldn't make it look sharp without blurring everything out.

And ETO...

There is a way, though: fractal algorithms can essentially "hallucinate" details that weren't even in the original file. As long as you aren't looking too closely, a shot of the rolling hills in the Midwest can look razor-sharp. But once you zoom in, you realize it isn't actually grass—it's just math filling in the blanks where the information doesn't exist, making it look decent at a quick glance.

Reading between the lines of what you wrote, I honestly don't think there’s any software out there or even some fancy AI algorithm capable of pulling off a high-resolution upscale like that, especially if the original file was already heavily compressed to begin with.

You might get a slightly better result if you print it out and then scan it back in, or you could always try taking a quick photo of your monitor with your phone and just seeing if the built-in processing gets lucky with the enhancement.

At the end of the day, it's really tough to turn a low-quality image into something crisp and clear without someone stepping in to manually redraw it by hand.