Effective PPI - help with yearbook

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@L_Perk wrote:

The images are 250 ppi but the images were englarged in the program so the effective ppi is 58 (which is why my images are not crisp).

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The problem there is that a ppi value never has any meaning by itself, only when the ppi and the number of inches are both stated. That’s what Effective Resolution is: The ppi value after accounting for scaling the number of available pixels across a specific number of inches.

There are two ways you can solve this. You can require that the photographer supply the photos as either:

• The ppi resolution you need (250 ppi?) at the specific length you need to print them, in inches. If the photographer supplies that, they will not need to be resized, so the effective resolution will be 250 ppi.
• Their original full resolution. If the photographer supplies that, then you know you have all the original pixels. You’ll be able to freely resize them as needed, and because you have all the original pixels, the effective resolution (resolution after resizing) is more likely to stay above 250 ppi or whatever your print requirement is.

Did your photographer just supply you with images that would work for the size of your small yearbook pictures not knowing that you need them also for a larger format? if that's the case then just go back to them and ask them for the full res pictures for that purpose.

There's no fix to improve the resolution because you can't bring back what was not there. You can attempt to hide effects of  using a low-res pic to a certain extent by doing things like upsampling them in Photoshop but this will not improve crispness and edge detail. Talk to your photographer.

What kind of photographer would supply images that small?

Go back to him/her and make sure to get the full resolution images. It sounds like they were emailed and were shrunk down in the process.