Watch the video above then read the instruction below which document the actions taken in the video. The video above is intended as a visual indicator of where to go next, the detail of the tutorial is contained within the textual content of the page below:

Resizing an image within Photoshop is a very easy action but a few simple rules will stop you getting too much distortion of your image and rendering a beautiful image useless simply because you want to use it in a different context to the original.

To start select: Image - Image Size.

Most electronic/digital images that come out of a modern digital camera will be of a very high resolution which is great, this is the reason we spend lots of money on high specification digital cameras. However it will be quite rare that the image will come out of the camera in the perfect size and shape for the context it was intended, most of the time we will need resize our image. This is a simple action but what we want to do is retain as much of the original image quality without introducing any distortion.

If we wish to retain the image dimensions which will avoid changing the image composition then we need to ensure that the Constrain Proportions tick box is checked. This will automatically work out the opposing dimension when one of the values is amended, when this box is checked chain links are displayed against the dimensions to indicate that the two are linked. Conversely these chain links are not displayed when unchecked and this allows you to change the dimensions of the image but this will distort the composition of the image but this may be what you want.

The Resample Image tick box will allow Photoshop to recalculate the image for the dimensions provided and this is what Photoshop is very good at therefore this box should always be checked. Options for Resample Image are as follows:

• Nearest Neighbour
• Bilinear
• Bicubic (best for smooth gradients)
• Bicubic (best for enlargement)
• Bicubic (best for reduction)

The bracketed tips appear within the dialogue box options.

Reducing images will always produce better results than enlarging as to reduce an image Photoshop is taking a lot of information and reducing it (getting rid of excess information). Enlarging images is a different proposition as Photoshop is trying to take the existing data and stretch it and the more it is stretched the more stretched it will appear. Enlargement will only work within a small enlargement range and still get good results a trick to enlarge an image is to pump up its DPI this can produce better results but is a bit hit and miss but can be worth a try if you are not getting the results you want any other way..

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