Hey everyone, since I've joined this site I've found a lot of new techniques and styles throughout these pages.  One thing the kinda amazes me is how good of a quality image some of you get when you make an extreme close-up of a rather small image.  From my experiences zooming in/out of an image can sometimes make it look pixelated or roughened up really bad.

Can you give a guy some pointers here?

There's a program called "Focus Magic" that upsamples images using advanced interpolation techniques.  It seems to work very well, but I'm not an expert. It's also awesome at sharpening, and not too bad at only $50.00

http://www.focusmagic.com/

Can you give an example? Are you sure the close usp does not come from the original images and not the websized image posted?

I too would like an example. Most of the files we like to retouch are over 2500-3000px on its shortest side, but when they get uploaded to the web they need to be resized to be viewable in the forum or to be uploaded in the portfolio. That usually means they are less than 900px. The extreme close-ups are examples of the detail found on the original image, so technically they aren't close ups at all, but extreme cropping.