How Can I Resize My Images so I can Use Them on the Web?

This article is in response to that question. I've lost count of how many times I've been asked it.

Well, the answer is: You Need Image Editing Software.  

Personally, I use Photoshop CS2, but Photoshop Elements will work just as well, and so will a number of other programs including some shareware programs. Just do a Google search for photo editing software.

So, let's see how it's done.

In other articles we have suggested that you set your camera to capture either RAW files, or at least the largest possible JPEG files, or both. This means that you will be creating extremely large files of at least 6 megabites, maybe more. So, from time to time, for one reason or another, you will need to resize the images you make in your camera and make them more manageable. This might be because you want to email them, send them out as attachments to emails, or even to use them in online articles.  

Typically, images meant for publication in a glossy magazine, book or stock photo agency will need to be sent as a large file at the best possible resolution. Online stock photo agencies are geared toward receiving up-loaded, large image files, but magazine and book publishers are not. You will need to send those images on a disk by regular mail or carrier, such as UPS or FedEx. So there’s no need to downsize them. 

To send your images by email, however, you will need to downsize. If you’ve ever received an email with a 6mb image attached you’ll know why: it takes forever to download it. 

So, how do we do it? 

The first thing to do, by one method or another, is to transfer you images to your computer. That done, you will need an editing program and, as Photoshop is the publishing industry standard, it should be either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. 

The first step, then, is to launch the program. When it opens you will be faced with a screen that looks something like this:

 So, now you go to the tool bar at the top and click on “File.” This will bring up a drop-down menu. Select “Browse,” as you see in the screen-shot below. 

The “Browse” option will take you to the next screen which should look something like this:

Now you scroll down the options you see in the small window to the left until you find the find the file containing your images. Double click on the selected image and you will see something like this:

Looking at the screen-shot above, you can see I selected “Image” in the tool bar and then scrolled down to the “Image Size” option. Clicking on that will bring up a screen that looks like this:

Looking again at the screen-shot above, you can see the box in the center. This box contains your image size as it is now: in pixels at the top, in inches at the center, and the resolution in dots per inch is just below that – in this case 300 DPI. Now, to resize the image, all we have to do is change one of the dimensions in inches – from 13 to say 6 – and the dots per inch (DPI) from 300 to 72 (for on-screen viewing) like this: 

 We now click “OK” and are taken to the back to the screen as you see below

We now need to “Save As.” If we don’t, we’ll lose our original size JPEG. So, as you see above, go to “File” on the tool bar, select “Save As” and you be taken to a screen that looks like this:

Choose a location file where you’d like to deposit the new JPEG for future use, change the name and then select JPG, and then click on “Save.” This will take you to a final screen: this one:

The slider give you the size and resolution of your new file: slide it to the right for maximum “12” or to the left for the smallest file “1.” The baseline should be selected “optimized.” And that’s all there is to it.

This article is copyright © Blair Howard 2006. All rights reserved. You can reprint this article for free but you must retain the internal links and the credit line at the bottom of the article intact.

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