How to Resize Images Basics

How to Resize Images Basics

You have taken some great pictures and now you want to share them. You can email, put on a website, add to a document, upload to an online photo album or burn to disk. As you get ready to one of these things you hit a major problem, the pictures are too big and need to be resized with an image resizer but how do you do that?

The images need to be resized an image resizer, the next step is to learn how to resize pictures.

The following article will guide you through the basic steps to learn how to resize images. This involves 3 basic things, the right height, width and quality of the image, if you set these three things correctly, you will resize images properly every time.

Need to know basic terminology:

Medium
(Plural media) are the print (newspaper, magazines, etc.) and electronic (email, website) communication devices used for sharing information.

Height
How high your image is.
Width
How wide your image is.

Quality
In laymen terms image quality is how much detail is in the image, the lower the quality the less detail there is, if the quality is too low then the image looks blocky, if the quality is too high then the file size grows and this really matters if you are emailing or showing the image on the web.
Quality of an image in a document printed out should always be higher than the quality of one being viewed on the internet as when a image is printed out it needs higher quality than an image that you view on your computer.

Aspect Ratio
Easiest way to explain aspect ratio is to say that it means the ratio between the width of the picture and the height of the picture. When you resize a picture you need to ensure to calculate the aspect ratio of the new size to ensure the picture is not stretched or skewed. Most resize tools such as Picture Resize will do this for you.

Every medium such as email, websites and online photo galleries show pictures differently, each one need their pictures resized to different heights widths and quality.
The problems that you will face are; pictures hare too big, too small, appear stretched or skewed or appear blocky and may even have bits missing here and there, these are all signs of an image not being resized properly to fit the medium they are on.

Images are too big:
If the pictures are too big then the Height and width of the image is too large.

Blocky looking pictures
Height and width too small on the image
Or the quality is too low.

Images appear stretched or skewed.
This has the affect of like looking into a fun mirror at a carnival, things either appear too tall or too short and too wide. The reason for this is because the aspect ratio has been compromised

These are all symptoms of images being resized incorrectly, they need to be resized properly for the medium they are appearing on.

Solution
What to do if your images are showing signs of not being resized properly by an image resizer
Pictures too big
Reduce height and width
Keep aspect ratio

Pictures too blocky
Increase quality
Increase height and width

Stretched or skewed
Fix aspect ratio

Image Resizer Tools
I have been resizing images for many years and have used different tools, there’s a whole slew of them on the web and in your favorite computer store, they range from free to $600 plus and they all do a good job. The free image resizer I like is Picture Resize, you can download a full free copy of this image resizer from the Picture Resize website at www.pictureresize.com/picrsz45.htm

The free version of the image resizer, Picture Resize, will give you everything you need to start resizing images, it even batch resizes images for you. The full version has many extra features that you will find you will need as you learn more about resizing pictures and you can easily upgrade it.

What I like about Picture Resize is that it has preset sizes for you to use which removes all the hard work of determining the best sizes to resize your image to depending on the medium such as email, online photo galleries or documents you are resizing your image to.

As you see the complex task of resizing images with an image resizer can be made simple to make your pictures look perfect no matter what medium you are showing them on.