Expert: LizaL - 12/13/2004

Question

I am trying to take a photo and resize it so that it will fit on a 4 x 6 to be inserted into a Christmas card.  I have croped it and resized it (I thought) several times and it still is not right.

Can you help me with this?

BTW  I have it saved as a jpeg.

Thanks.

Kathy :)

Answer
Hi Kathy,

You didn't mention what version of Photoshop you're using, so I'll give you some instructions for CS. Please let me know if this isn't right!

Anyway, one of the easiest ways to make sure you have the right dimensions when cropping a picture is to set the options for the Crop tool. Check out this movie and I'll explain:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/crop.mov

When you select the Crop tool, as you can see, you can set the options for the tool right below the pulldown menus. I changed mine to 4 x 6, with a resolution of 72dpi (which is meant for onscreen display, not print quality, but this is just an example :) ). Anyway, if you use the Crop tool in this manner, you're guaranteed to get the size you need.

Of course, this example shows me cropping the picture. If you want to preserve the entire image, and not crop any part of it out, you'd need to go to the Image pulldown menu, and select Image Size, and change the dimensions there. Make sure you change the size in the Document Size area, and not the Pixel Dimensions area at the top of the dialogue box. And also make sure you've got the Constrain Proportions box checked, near the bottom of the Image Size dialogue box. This will ensure that you don't stretch your image out of proportion.

Along these same lines, something else that comes to mind here is resolution. Changing a picture's resolution can really change the look of it, especially if you're making the picture larger, instead of smaller.

As I mentioned, 72dpi, of course, is for onscreen imaging. For print, you'd want at least 150dpi, if not 300. So if you change not only the document size but the dpi, and you make these numbers larger, you're doing what's called "sampling up."

Sampling up is kind of hard for Photoshop to do accurately, because when you do this, you're asking Photoshop to add pixels to the picture in order to make it bigger. After all, pictures only have a finite number of pixels to start with, and when you ask Photoshop to make the picture bigger, you're asking Photoshop to add in what's really not there.

This is called interpolation, and sometimes this can make a picture look fuzzy or pixelated. So if you have to enlarge a picture by sampling up, at least be sure you have the Resample Image box checked -- and this is in that same Image Size dialogue box. Also have Bicubic selected from the corresponding pop-up menu, because Bicubic is the method that is supposed to make the picture look the smoothest.

Anyway, I hope these things give you a little more insight and help with what you're doing. If not, please post back and tell me the steps you're going through that aren't working, and we'll go from there!

Lisa