January 02, 2011

How to resize photos in Photoshop

Sunday, January 02, 2011    


Resizing a picture is very important when it comes to saving the disk space, sending an image in a email or using the resized image as a profile picture on Facebook. A photo captured with a digital camera is very large in size and the need to resize the image arises.

As the resolution of the digital camera increases the image size also increases and thus the need to resize the image.
This table given below, shows an estimate of how much the size of a picture is reduced when resized down in Adobe Photoshop.

Digital camera resolution

21 MP

14 MP

10 MP

5 MP

actual image size(approx.)

12 MB

4 MP

2 MP

1 MP

Approx.. image size after resizing the image

8 MB

2 MB

1 MB

500 KBs


To resize an image, either  Adobe Photoshop or any online utility can be used. But, using Adobe Photoshop is a flexible way to resize an image as you get wide range of controls over the whole resizing procedure.

How to resize the picture?

a) Procedure to Resize an image by 50% in Photoshop

1. Open the image in Photoshop

2. Click on image tab from drop down menu and select image size.

resize image photoshop

3. In image size window, under pixel dimensions change pixel to percentage and set the width and height to 50. Also make sure that you select bicubic smoother from the lower drop-down menu.

resize percent photoshop

note: the number next to width and height denotes the percentage by which the image will be resized. In this case it is 50% resized.

4. After applying all these settings click OK and save the new resized image, replacing the old one.
For the above example, the new resized image was 1.5 MB in size while the original image before resizing was 4.7  MB in size.

b) Procedure to resize an image by pixels(px) in Photoshop

Resizing an image by pixel value follows almost the same procedure as that when resizing by percentage, except that you have to select pixels under the image size window. See the screenshot below…

resize pixels photoshop

In my example, I have chosen the dimensions 1600*1200 pixels for the image to be resized. The original dimensions were 3240*4320 pixels(14 megapixels). The image is resized down to this resolution at the expensive of a bit degradation of quality due to loss of pixel values.