How do you enlarge the pictures without blurring or distorting them? Every time I try it goes badly wrong

Which picture in the guide do you want enlarging?

Note: I'm assuming it's a guide picture, rather than the topic being hijacked... so don't sue me.

I don't want a picture enlarging, I just want to know how to enlarge without distorting or vectorising

I don't know about in Gimp or any other free photo editors, but my Photoshop CS3 does a great job of enlarging pictures without distorting them.

Unless your picture is vector based and your working inside a vector image manipulation program such as adobe illustrator or corel draw then this is impossible. I'm assuming what you always try to enlarge is photos, unfortunately you cannot enlarge these without bad quality. This is because you would be working in pixels, pixels are squares. When you blow it up, it simply won't retain quality however vector images can retain their quality because they are created from binary coding in computers. You basically have to imagine lot's of numbers create an equation that would help to define a line or curve for example.

I guess I can add that if you really still need to blow a photo up, it would be better to have a higher quality photo. There would still be some distortion from it. Also, make sure if you really want to keep some kind of quality then make sure that you size to proportion rather than just clicking and dragging photos anywhere.

Handy tip: don't use MS Word or Paint for resizing images.

Photoshop and GIMP do a pretty good job on resizing my pictures without too much quality loss. However, there are some professional programs solely used for resizing pictures. A Google search should give you some results.

What he said. Also, try messing with the contrast on the picture after resizing it, that works once in a while.