How To Resize Your Digital Photograph

I get a lot of questions about adjusting image sizes from people. How do I resize an image for printing or to put on a website? What’s the right way? What’s the best way?

Here ya go!

1. Open up your image in Photoshop. Choose your desired DPI or resolution. You may or may not need to change this, depending on your camera settings. Are you shooting in raw format or jpeg? There’s no right or wrong on that, it’s just a personal preference.

2. If you need to change your resolution, go to your Photoshop toolbar and click “IMAGE” – then – IMAGE SIZE. This will open up a dialogue box that looks like this:

original

3. If you are changing the DPI or resolution of the image you need to deselect the “Resample Image” box. This will allow you to change the resolution of your image without losing or gaining any pixels. This is a very important step. In this example we’re changing the DPI from 72 to 300.

4. Once you have entered your desired resolution click OK. Notice that even though we changed the resolution setting the overall size of the image stayed the same at 955.7K.

300

5. Go back and click “IMAGE” – IMAGE SIZE - again to bring back the dialogue box.

6. When you are ready to change the image’s dimensions be sure that the “Resample Image” box is checked. This keeps the image’s proportions intact.

7. Enter the desired Width or Height of the image. You only need to enter one of the two since the other will be calculated for you because the “Resample Image” box is enabled. Notice now that the overall size of the image has gone from 955.7K to 394.9K.

resize