How to Resize Images in Photoshop
Hey Cafe crew, it's Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE and today I'm going to address
something really simple is how to resize images in Photoshop.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you there's different ways of resizing images
to get different results depending on what kind of an image that you're trying to resize.
So for those of you who are a little confused about resolution and stuff like that, I'm
going to clear that up.
I'm going to make this as simple as I can without getting too technical, but what I'm
going to do is I'm going to show you how to get the best results every single time inside
of Photoshop.
Before I do anything, let me just tell you here's a little piece that I've created.
Notice it is a flattened image and I've done this because I've got gradients, I've got
fine lines, I've got curved fine lines, Type and a photo in there, so this is kind of purposefully
put together to test different types of graphic and image types as we resize them.
And, of course, you can download this from PhotoshopCAFE.com and I'll give you a link
underneath so you can grab this image and experiment for yourself.
Let's talk about resizing the images.
Let's go up under here and let's look at Image, Image Size, and you can see it's a 1200 by
1000 more or less pixels.
That is how big this image is.
Okay, so it's 300 pixels, but you can print this at 4x3 and it would look good.
Go any bigger than that, you start to lose quality.
So here's a rule of thumb.
You can scale images down but you can't really scale them up.
Now when I say can't scale them up, you can scale them up a little bit.
You can get away with 10 or 20% and in a jam you can go further.
Well let's have a look at that right now and go to Image Size.
This is how we resize the images here inside of Photoshop.
Now, if you're using CS6 or earlier, you're going to have this kind of dialog box.
If you're using CC, you can actually click and drag, and let's just take this full screen,
and then we can get a preview so we don't have to actually size to see what it's going
to look like.
So, this is the Image Size dialog box.
Now, here's the thing; if you want to change the resolution on here, you turn off Resample
and you can make that 72 and notice it's not changing the dimensions.
That's the important thing.
So, really, how big is this image?
It's 1259 x 932.
All right, so this is how you size it here, you know, as far as you're preparing it, like
I want it 300.
Okay, leave it at 300.
It hasn't changed anything.
All it's done is just changing the metadata.
Now, if you want to resize the image or make it a different size, turn on Resample.
And now here's the thing, when you turn on Resample, see this little chain link?
If you click that, now the width and height are going to change together.
If you wanted to change just the width or just the height independently, turn the chain
link off.
But we're going to turn it on right now and we're going to resize it.
Okay, so here's the thing about resizing.
Whereas this Resample you'll see all these different things here.
Those are called interpolation and we're going to look at those in a second, but we don't
have to worry about them scientifically.
There's basically two in there that really matter.
All right, so let's have a look.
So, say we're going to double the size of this.
We're going to increase it.
So this might be getting a little carried away, but here we go.
We're looking at an 8.
And if we look at it automatic, it's not bad, right?
So here's what we're getting here.
Here's our line art.
Here's our gradientóit's not bad.
Here's our Type, it's not bad, and here's our photo.
Now if you click, this is what it looks like without any interpolation.
Interpolation is a way that Photoshop calculates resizing it.
If I let go, this is what it looks like on Automatic.
So my guess is the Automatic is it just choose one of these.
It's probably going to grab this first oneóPreserve Details.
Yup and notice with the Preserve Details, the photo looks a little, you know, we can
see some halos and stuff around the edges.
It's trying to kind of give it a little bit of crispness and trying to maintain that.
However, if we go to something like a Bicubic Smoother, notice that looks better for the
photos, at least in my opinion.
You can all sharpen it later, but you're not getting the halos as badly around the edges.
So if we look at this and compare it, there's the details.
Yes, it looks sharper but it also looks a little crunchy.
In this case, it looks better for the photo; it looks smoother.
And let's have a look at things like the gradient up here.
See there's a gradient there.
If we choose this gradient with details, it looks a little crunchy, but here, it's smoother.
Now there's other things to look at like the line art, for example.
If we're working with things like line art and type and these kind of things, like look
at the lines there.
That's using the Smoother, but if we go to the Details, notice how nice and crisp and
sharp that is.
That's going to work better for that.
So let's talk about the different types of interpolation.
So, originally, there was three.
Nearest Neighbor, which is the lowest form, you can see that's very harsh, but if you've
got like dotted stippled artwork and things like that, some hand-drawn line arts, sometimes
that will actually give you the best result, but not every often.
Bilinear, though, this used to be our go to baby when we were working with a line art,
you know, when there was just the three, and it does work well with the line art.
And then, Bicubic is where it smoothens things or softens them a little bit.
And you can see, you know, here, it does look a little smoother but we are losing some of
the detail, you know, just depending on how fine the line art is.
So these used to be the three that we would work with and you can see the Bicubic always
looks better for the photos.
So there's the Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear and then we go to the Bicubic, boom, it looks
better for the photos.
Then what was added was two moreóBicubic Smoother and Bicubic Sharper.
Bicubic Smoother, what it does is it smoothens it out when we go larger so you don't get
pixelization.
Pixelization is if I click here, you can see the edges.
See the edge of that hat there?
See the little jaggies?
That reduces those jaggies.
Now there's two things you don't want in your photograph is jaggies and halos.
So you want to kind of avoid those if you can.
If we go here to the Sharper, Bicubic Sharper, it actually makes it look sharper, but this
is more for reduction because what happens is when you reduce it less than 100%, this
can get a little soft and condensed sometimes.
The newer one that was added is Preserve Details and Preserve Details can look really good
on the photo depending.
If you've got an area here where we've got like high contrast here, sometimes you can
get those little halos there that don't look so good, so if you kind of look, see how it's
just kind of crunchy in this weird art effects.
We can actually go in here and we can smoothen out those art effects, so if we'll look at
this all the way up versus all the way down.
Kind of see it?
You know, in here, notice some of the weirdness going on in the face.
You could actually bring those up a little bit and smoothen things out.
And sometimes, the smoother can look better.
Once again, as I mentioned, for this kind of work, line art and things like that, fine
lines--Preserve Details.
Boom, it's crisp but sharp.
It looks much better for this type of graphics.
Sharp is down to, say, 2.
So we're going to shrink this puppy all the way down.
If we go to the Sharper, notice here, look at the Type.
Look at these lines up here, the gradient and look at the photograph.
So let's just compare this.
So if we go to, say, a Bicubic Smoother, see how things are looking kind of soft?
And we're losing some of the definition than when we go to Bicubic Sharper.
Boom.
You can particularly see those lines there.
It kind of keeps that definition.
Now, if we go to the Automatic and the Automatic just kind of is going to choose the Preserve
Details for enlarger and the Bicubic Sharper for reducing the size of it.
So these are the things that really matter.
If you're increasing the size, at least from what I've seen, Preserve Details works really
well on line art, graphics, things like that.
Sometimes with photos, it can make it too crunchy, add too much of an art effect, and
then, of course, Bicubic Smoother will give you a smoother result.
And, of course, if you wanted to do it, to apply it, you just click OK, and now you have
this huge image.
Of course I can hit Ctrl 1, we'll to 100%, Ctrl 0 (zero) or Command 0 will show it to
you full screen.
Now if we look under here and we go in Image Sizeóyou could see it at the bottom anywayóbut
now that we've resized it, we can see now we've got this 4,000 x 3,000.
Let's have a look at a couple of little tricks too, which can save you time when it comes
to resizing.
So say we've got this image and we want to fit it within a certain size.
We can actually go up here and maybe we're working on an 8.5 x 11 and we can just choose
this 8.5x11.
Boom.
And what it's going to do is it's actually going to make it fit--I could zoom this out--the
best it can on that sheet.
So what it's going to do is it's going to go 8.5x8.4, so what it's going to do is it's
going to resize it to fit the best we could on there, so we could change this, you know,
to a Bicubic Smoother or whatever.
But notice when we're looking up here, we're not really getting an accurate representation.
There's another thing that's important.
You have to go to 100% to see what it's going to look like.
If you're not viewing it at 100%-- There we go, see?
That's exactly what you're going to get, so that's very, very important to do that.
Guys, I know this was a lot of stuff and I apologize if this was, you know, a lot of
theory, but I think this is something that a lot of people need to know.
It will help you preserve the quality of your images and I've noticed a lot of people, you
know, they're working and the images can kind of look soft and stuff like this, so what
I just showed you is kind of a little bit of a key to keeping those images nice and
clean and sharp and crisp.
So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed this.
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