Resizing Your Images

Being the "list mom" for a couple of groups on Yahoo I was inspired to write this tutorial as an aid for newbies, and seasoned PSPer's alike, to learn how to resize their images and retain the clarity. There is a very good reason why groups have a size limit. Many e-mail servers have a storage limit as to how much mail it will handle before it will start bouncing emails. Also, a great number of people on the internet pay per minute when accessing the Internet and the e-mail, and some pay for each KB that they download. Those of us on cable, DSL, or unlimited dial up tend to forget that those in other countries don't have the unlimited access that we have.

First, when opening a large image in PSP it can be deceiving to the eye as to how large it will appear when you send it in e-mail. You need to check the top of your image and check the ratio.

The example shown above is an image that is 800x600. It was far to big to show the entire image in this tutorial, but as you can see by the red circle it had a ratio of 1:2. It appeared on your workspace in PSP that it would be fairly acceptable for sharing in e-mail. If you had hit the Plus sign (+) it would have brought the ratio to 1:1 and you would see just how large it really was.

Hint: Hit the plus (+) it will zoom in by one making it larger, hit the minus sign (-) it will zoom out by one making it smaller.

Most of the lists that I am on require that the images you send in be no larger than 350 pixels on the longest side and no more than 50Kb. Obviously, each list varies with the size they allow so please remember this is a generalization.

A number of tutorials have you start with a very large new image. This is to give you a lot of room to work with. To send to your list you must remember to resize. There are a couple of ways that you can resize your completed image. The first, that I will show you, is to resize it by having 350 pixels on the longest side. Go to Image-->Resize. The image I was resizing was 800x600 so I entered 350 in the width, made sure that "resize all layers" and "maintain aspect ratio as" were checked. You do not need to change the ratio amount as PSP automatically know the ratio of the original image. I also almost always use the resize type of "Smart Size" as this is recommended by JASC.

After resizing you will lose some clarity so the very next thing that you need to do is go to Effects-->Sharpen-->Sharpen. This will get the majority of the clarity back that you lost in resizing. Here is my finished image after resizing this way.

The second way to resize is by percentage. This handy tip is in a number of my tutorials and I will add it here. One of the tricks you should use to squeeze the absolute best out of a resized image is to always try to resize to exactly three-quarters (75%), one-half (50%), or one-quarter (25%) the original image size. The mathematical reasons this works the best are beyond what I could explain in this little tip; but trust me--it works. Basically, Paint Shop Pro uses a complex algorithm to figure out which pixels to keep and which ones to throw out. Using a standard resize value lets PSP work at its optimal levels. I also have to add that ANY time you resize in PSP (including tubes!) you must sharpen your image for optimal viewing. Go to Effects --> Sharpen -->Sharpen.

Now we have your image resized so it still looks clear and is an acceptable size to send in to your groups. We now need to go to the optimizer to get it to an acceptable KB size to send.

Go to File-->Export-->JPEG Optimizer and the following screen will come up.

I normally set the compression value to 25. Obviously you can adjust this to meet your needs. The higher the compression reduces the file size but it also lowers the quality of the image. Use your best judgment. On the left it shows you your image before compression and the right side shows you what it will look like after compression. It also shows you how big the file was before compressing and what it will be after compressing. As you can see it was 277 KB, that is quite large for mail or a webpage to handle. After compressing it was down to a manageable size of 33 KB and your quality is still there.

I do hope that this tutorial will help you in sending in your graphics and keeping the quality of your work.

If you have any comments or questions please do not hesitate to E-mail me.

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Tutorial written and created by Patti Wavinak for Moon's Designs. These Tutorials are copyrighted by law. You may LINK to them only. You may not remove any of the graphics, zip files or html within these pages to reproduce these Tutorials, without the expressed permission of Moon's Designs. These pages may not be removed from this website and sent via e-mail, nor saved, stored or archived in files in YahooGroups or other mailing list sites, nor may they be translated and placed on another site.
Creations made from these tutorials are for personal use only.

Moon's Designs holds the copyright to all selections, original tubes and original images that I have created and provided for use within my tutorials. Page backgrounds and images are created exclusively for this website and may not be downloaded or used without written permission.
If you would like to use any of my tutorials for group lessons please contact me.

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