Resizing Photos

To create the photo strip displayed at the top of campus site is a I need to begin resizing photos. The finished images displayed as shown below.

My first step was to resize the photos, without distorting the images.

Here is what the Maggini hall photo looked at when I downloaded it from the web.

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When resizing or editing images always do this in the RGB mode. Most photographs will be saved as JPEGs which are automatically saved in the RGB mode. Sometimes you will need to resize an image which has been saved as a GIF which contains 256 colors or less. Another common problem is when clip art or a log is scanned in as a black and white image. To convert any image to the RGB mode, access the Image menu > Mode > and select RGB.

There are several ways to resize an image. The traditional technique was to first select the image by accessing the Select menu > Select All (Command A). You will know the image is selected because handles will appear on all 4 corners of the image. Next you can access the Edit menu > Transform > Scale. The option bar at the top of the screen will change allowing you to control the amount the image is scaled. Photoshop scales best at 50% so I begin by reducing the photo of Maggini Hall by 50%. Once I have entered 50 into the width box I can select the lock icon to assure that the Height will also be 50%.

Once I have entered my scaling settings I must remember to press the ENTER key or select another tool. This completes the scaling command and allows me to move on. If you find all your menus are grayed out, Photoshop is probably waiting for you to select ENTER.

A quick way to scale an image is to simply use the pointer tool and hover near the corner of an image, a double sided diagonal arrow will appear> This icon indicates you are in the transform mode and can to click and drag a corner of the image to scale it. It is difficult to manually drag to a 50% scale, so I usually just make a preliminary drag, and then enter the 50% in the option bar.

As I scale this image you will notice that the overall size of the canvas remains the same and the photo of the campus becomes smaller. I now have a small photo of Maggini Hall on a large white background. If I want just the small photo of the building I can crop the image, however that is one more step.

Here is another way to scale an image so that the canvas and the image are both reduced, access Image menu > Image Size. This window appears.

A little math skill is required for this one, I see the width of the image is 697 and the height is 461. To scale at 50% I simply reduce the width or height by half. Since these are odd numbers I need to round down to 696 / 2 = 348. When I enter a new width the height automatically adjusts because the "constrain proportions" box is checked and the linking icon displays. As I select OK I notice that the photo of the campus is reduced by half and this time there is no white space around the image.

I used the width and height which were displayed in the "Pixel Dimensions" area of the Image Size window. I could also use the "Document Size" Width and Height displayed in inches (toward the middle of the window), or I could have reduced the pixels per inch from 150 to 75. All 3 techniques would have caused the image to be reduced by half.

You can use the transform command, the diagonal double arrow, or the image size dialog box to resize an image, it is up to you.

After scaling by half 2 times my image now displays as a much smaller image which still retains it's sharp crisp lines and color. The image is 174 by 115 pixels.