Keeping images smooth and "crisp"

[ethical]

Hi guys,

I'm in the process of doing my Year Book page right now, and I've got a few photos I want to put into it. Im using photoshop. What I'm doing at the moment is File>Open then opening the photo and dragging it into my document, then I transform it a lot, they were taken with a 10MP camera and need to be 5/6cm wide and high. So I shrink them, holding shift to keep the ratio of width to height, and then I add a drop shadow, and a white stroke, and then rotate them a little bit. You can probably see im going for the tacky collage of photos placed on top of each other at weird angles look. Basically, my problem is that when i print it out to take a look, the pictures are "fuzzy" (pixelated almost), and the stroke line is very fuzzy/zip-zag like. Is there a way to correct this? I'm guessing the pictures are fuzzy because i'm trying to cram a lot of image info into a small space and the line is fuzzy because it's at an angle? but this is just my guess.
Is there a better way of going about doing this? Also, if anyone has any ideas for how I can spice it up a bit then any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Luke

 

[decksnap]

You just need to make sure this target document you are dragging things into is a print quality resolution (300 dpi+) As long as you are scaling things down and not up, you should be fine. Although I don't rotate a lot of photo in PS so I don't know what the results of that are like.

 

[rush0]

After you drag your image into the document, right click on the layer and click 'Convert to Smart Object'. Make sure you do this before applying any transformations.

 

[AlexisV]

Go to Image size, put in 5/6cm in the width field and make resolution is 300dpi (it probably says 72 in that field at the moment).

 

[jrm27]

Did you take the pictures yourself? They may need a bit of "sharpening".

 

[ChrisA]

Did you take the pictures yourself? They may need a bit of "sharpening".

The gross amount of down sizing you are doing should have the effect of makingthem much sharper and eliminating any noise. You are likely, without knowing it resampling them to some low resolution DPI.