I've had a few people ask me lately "Do you have any of your brush sets available in larger sizes?" Unfortunately, the answer to that is pretty much "No." When I make these, I make the original size somewhere around 500 X 500 pixels in most cases, because most people don't need them to be much larger than that. If I made them much bigger, the file sizes would start to get really huge.

I do have a few higher resolution sets, where the brush sizes are more like 1000 X 1000 pixels. But, once I finish a set, I don't keep any original images that I used to make that set, so the sizes are pretty much what they are.

Keep in mind, though, that these ARE Photoshop brushes. I mean, just because the original size is 400 X 400 pixels doesn't mean that's the largest it can be used. You can make the brush size a decent amount larger right there in Photoshop, without getting much blurring.

So, what if you can't? Is there a way to make a particular brush larger and still keep it very crisp and sharp? Yes! In fact, this doesn't apply to just brushes. It applies to any "shape" that you want, really, provided that it's not something terribly complex. It won't work very well for your basic photograph, for example. But, it's great for a design like I use below.

Please keep in mind that this tutorial is written with Photoshop CS2 specifically in mind. It makes use of "Smart Sharpen," which isn't available in any previous version of Photoshop. I don't THINK it's available in any versions of Photoshop Elements, but I may be wrong. (And if I am, please correct me in the comments so that I can fix this!) You can try the tutorial using any of them, but the quality of the ending image just won't be the same. None of the other sharpen tools really come close to what Smart Sharpen is able to do.

You can follow along with the tutorial using the same image that I used. Download the image here.

1. Say that this tribal design on the right (from my old Tribal Brush Set - it has since been remade into high resolution vectors) is far too small for what I'd like to use it for. I'm SOL, right? Wrong! With a design like this, and anything that's not too terribly intricate, you can generally resize it without losing too much detail. Let's see how.

(BTW, feel free to use my tribal image to follow along with this tutorial. Download it by clicking on "Download the image here" above.)

2. Click on Image > Mode > RGB to make sure that you're in RGB mode first.

Now, click on Image > Image Size. The following window will pop up. The resolution is what we want to change. Sure, you could just make it larger by changing the width and height in pixels, but that is just going to make it really pixelated and blurry. So, changing the resolution is the key. This started out at 72. I changed it to 200 pixels/inch, as you can see.

Most images you will be able to double the initial number - some a bit more, some a bit less. This was a very "clean" image already, so I can more than double it. What you choose will depend on your image, and you will likely have to do some playing around with it to get it just right. But try doubling it, at first. That's a good starting point.

3. This is what mine looks like. It will most definitely be blurry, so expect that. What you you do NOT want is something that's got a bunch of really ragged and pixelated edges.

So, we want to get rid of that blurriness, but first we want to be absolutely sure that all the edges are smoothed out. This doesn't have many uneven edges, but some things you'll want to resize will have some bumpy edges.

4. So, to get rid of the bumps, we're going to blur it even further.

Select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. This menu will come up.

As I'd mentioned, this image really didn't need much smoothing, so I'm only blurring it a very little bit (1.2 pixels).

Play around with the slider at the bottom until your image doesn't have any more obvious bumps at the edges. Don't get it so blurry that the image starts to become unrecognizable, however. There's only so much blurriness that the next step can "fix."

Something like what you see here in the window is about right.

5. In the top menu, click Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen.

Please note that in order to use Smart Sharpen, you NEED to have Photoshop CS2 or higher. In older versions of PS and some versions of PS Elements, you could try using "Sharpen Edges" and other sharpen tools, but you simply won't get the same effect that you do with this.

Now, the "Amount" I usually have set at 500% or very close to it. That is what will make sure that all of your edges are crisp. The bottom slider (Radius) really depends on the image. So, play around with them.

You will see an image preview (as long as you have that option clicked at the top), so that you can see what changes you are making as you go.

6. Here's my image preview:

As you can see, the smart sharpen does a wonderful job of smoothing out and cleaning up the edges, but notice what happens to all of the "pointy" parts? They get smoothed out.

So, that's the last thing that we need to fix.

7. I like to use the smudge tool, which you can find in the tools palette here:

But, if you'd prefer, you could certainly use a brush to paint in the sharp edges again yourself.

For beginners, I'd stick with the smudge tool. It's perfect for easily adding back in those pointy edges with a few single strokes.
Here's the settings I used:

The higher the strength, the more it will "smudge."

7. Points like this one are easy to remember to get...

... but don't forget "inner" points like this one:

9. Here's my finished image:

It will be very close to the original image, just larger. Smart Sharpen is a really great tool. If I had set the radius of this one to higher, it would have thickened out the lines of this design quite a bit.

For the purposes of this tutorial, though, I was trying to get the final image as close to the original as possible. But you could use different blur and sharpen settings to come up with some very interesting results.

And if you choose an image without any pointed edges, you likely won't have to do step 7-8 (the smudging) at all.

That's it, you're done!