Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to retain quality when you're resizing photos in Adobe Photoshop. And I would like to say that
the key word here is 'retain,' so get the original quality back. Now before we get too far into this
video, I want to mention that if you're wanting to increase the size of a photo larger than 100%,
and keep the quality, that's not really possible. There are some ways you can increase the size and
get the photo to look a little better with plugins or tools like Unsharp Mask and Blur,
but honestly, in my opinion, they don't help very much. What we're going to talk about today is a
different scenario you might have come across. Basically this: if you open your photo first,
and then copy and paste it into your document, you'll run into this problem. I'll show you what
I mean. Okay, so here is the document I'm working on. And I want to add a photo and put it right in
here. So I'm going to open this photo. And I'm going to select all and copy it. And then I'll
come back to my original document, and I'm just going to click on that blue shape and paste it, so
it'll be right there. Now this is going to come in absolutely huge. So I'm going to hit CMD T or CTRL
T on my keyboard, and then CMD 0 or CTRL 0 to see the whole size of that image. I'm going to scale
it down a little bit more, and I think I went to about right there. I'll hit Return or Enter,
and now I'm going to hit the number 5, which is 50%, so I can just kind of see through this
and position it right where I want it. And then I'll hit 0 to get back to 100%.
Now I'm going to CMD click the layer under it, get back on my photo and mask it.
And that's the same as going to Layer > Layer Mask and Reveal Selection. Okay, so now it's in there,
we send our website off to the client, and later the client comes back and he wants changes. He
wants this photo to become the top image, so this photo up here. So I'll make a copy of this
holding OPTION, and then click and drag. I'll bring it to the front with Shift CMD ],
and then I'll hit CMD T to resize this to fit in that area. It might be a little bit big. Okay,
and I'll hit Enter or Return. And now when we zoom in on this, you can see it's become pretty fuzzy.
I'll also mask this one in. Okay, so how can we avoid this? It all depends on how you bring in
the original photo. So the problem generally arises when you're using copy and paste.
So copying from this picture, and then pasting it into a different document.
Doing that just gives you a regular layer, which won't remember pixel sizes and that
kind of thing. It can only work with the pixels it currently has. So if you make it smaller,
it's sort of locked in at that small size. And when you resize it bigger again,
you'll get a blurry image, if that makes sense. I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this layer.
This time, I'm going to take that same photo, and I'll just click and drag it into my document.
When I do it this way, it'll automatically resize it to the canvas, which is kind of nice. Now I'm
going to make this quite a bit bigger, so we can have about the same proportions we had last time.
Maybe a little bigger. Okay, and I'll hit Enter or Return. Now you'll notice over here in our Layers
panel, we have a little picture on the layer this time. And that means it's a Smart Object.
Now Smart Objects hold the original photo size, so you can scale it down, and then back up again,
and it'll still retain quality. Let's go ahead and mask this one in. And now when we zoom in,
it's a lot more clear, because it's holding that original resolution. So that is one of
the reasons that smart objects are so great - they're able to remember the original resolution.
Another way to do this is to go to File > Place. That'll give you a Smart Object too.
Now, I also want to mention vectors. If we go out to Illustrator, and we need to get a new
icon in here, I can open in Illustrator, copy it here, and then just paste into Photoshop.
When I do that, I'll get the option of having a smart layer. So I'll choose that. And this does
the same thing - it'll allow us to resize without losing quality. So I'm going to choose Smart
Object and say OK. Now I'm going to hit Enter or Return, and I'm going to bring this onto the
top of the layer list by hitting Shift CMD and ] or Shift control ] on PC. So you can see it
right here. Now the cool thing about vector Smart Objects is you can just double click the picture
and it'll open it again in Adobe Illustrator. Then you can click on it and just make a change,
save it, and then close this document and go back to Photoshop,
and it'll update here. So it's a really cool way to kind of use vector images in Photoshop but
not have to try to edit them here in Photoshop. All right, if you liked this video, please click
the Like button. And I'll see you in a couple days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!