Exporting a zoomed image

Upsizing a digital image has always been a last resort, as it is always going to cause a reduction in image quality.

Using the Image Size dialog it is usually best avoid the default Automatic as it is likely to choose something nasty and ruin the image. Even when downsizing.  A good few years ago Preserve Details 2.0 was added, and that was as good as any of the upsizing plugins that were around at that time.  I tend to set it to Bilinear in Preferences so if I forget to change it, I will still get a reasonable result.

We now have the Ai assisted Neural Filters which has a Super Zoom.  If you use this and set the output to New Layer, you can use the Zoom Image icon to increase it's size, but AFAICT you don't have a lot of control of the resizing.  I also can't tell you if it is better that Preserve Details 2.0 because I try avoid upsizing at all costs, but ISTM that there'd be no point to it if it was better that PD2.

If you use Free Transform (Ctrl T) on the resized layer, you'll see that all of the content is still there, but out of frame, so you can compose and size if you need to.

The zoom aspect would require you to resize/resample the current image, then crop the current image. You can use nearest neighbour resampling with values of 200%, 400% etc... Otherwise Bilinear would probably be the closest resampling method.

Otherwise take a screenshot  :]

The image is made of pixels, so many pixels wide by so many pixels high.

Zooming is just enlarging those pixels on screen. You're not getting any more pixels by zooming, they're just displayed bigger.

In other words, your question rests on a faulty premise. There is only crop. There is no "zoom".

Hi @Sisyphus 1 ,

The zoom tool in photoshop is really just a user interface tool to help you see parts of the image more clearly in your workspace. Once zoomed in to your canvas (Or photo in Lightroom), you can use the crop tool to get that perfect framing of your subject for export. 

Feel free to go into more detail of what you are looking to do if the above suggestion is not working for you.

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

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