I want to be able to export an image from Lightroom at a higher pixel count than the original— that is, instead of each pixel of the image being one pixel by one pixel, they are, say ten by ten pixels. What I don't want is for the pixels to be smoothed into each other/anti aliased.
I tried exporting the image from Lightroom and specifying the desired width at a higher pixel count than the original, but it automatically anti-aliased the image.
Is what I'm asking possible?
Anti-aliasing is a technique used to make shapes and lines appear less jagged in pixel based graphics. Anti-aliasing is only a part of some of the algorithms that Lightroom and other professional applications deploy when upscaling images. Considering the fact that you are really trying to generate (passable) information that wasn't there in the first place, there are limitations to upscaling images.
Lightroom doesn't have the same advanced algorithms that other applications dedicated solely to upscaling images have, so you will get better results if you upscale to a multiple of the original width and height; 200%, 400% etc. Photoshop will allow you to pick between a handful of different resampling algorithms, but Lightroom will intelligently pick behind the scenes.
If you are looking for a better implementation of upscaling, that is a question that has been asked before:
If you want to preserve the pixels when upscaling, as mattdm suggests might be the case, that is possible in Photoshop with the resampling algorithm; Nearest neighbor. I haven't found any results online to suggest the same is possible with Lightroom, which makes sense because such a feature would add nothing for photographers. If you have access to Photoshop, this tutorial explains:
I think you'll need to export and resize it in some other software.
Gimp can resize with no pixel interpolation:
This is trivial using ImageMagick's scale option. Assuming your original image (exported from Lightroom) is original.gif, and your upscaled output image will be upscaled.gif, then,
convert original.gif -scale 1000% upscaled.gif
will produce an image that is 10× larger in each dimension, effectively "blowing up" the 1×1 pixels in the original image to 10×10.
Important: make sure the scale percentage is a multiple of 100%, otherwise pixel interpolation will occur.
