Photo Resizing

Resizing your Photo's

photo by Jim Huffman

Most, if not all, digital cameras come with supplemental software which enables even neophytes to do basic photo processing. With these programs provided by the camera manufacturers, you should be able to resize, crop, adjust brightness and contrast, and adjust sharpness, on any and all of your photos.

Locate the software provided with your camera purchase. It should be on a regular CD with obvious camera brand markings on it. If you have lost or just want to try a different program, I have had good results from this manufacture.

If you have a software disk provided with the camera, insert this disk in your computer and wait for the prompts to install useful photo processing software, to appear on your monitor.

One or more prompts on your monitor should be a selection to install viewing or editing software. If in doubt select all of them to install.

After the successful installation of your camera viewing software, then attempt to find and view your photos. If you have stored your photos in the normal "windows" place, they will be located in your "users" folder under your name, and under pictures and then some sub folder relative to the process of downloading photos from your camera to your computer. If you can't find your photos for resizing, you wont be able to find them to email either. The same process you use to attach a photo to an email is the same process you should be using here, to locate your photos for resizing.

After you have located your photos, select one of them to resize. All photo viewing software is different but the way to resize should be intuitive and easy to do following screen prompts on how to do it. Be diligent in finding the resizing feature of your software.

Lastly, please read to the end of this tutorial, for very important additional hints on file naming conventions and storing of resized photos.

This photo has been resized to 800 horizontal pixels by 533 vertical pixels from the original 3,504 x 2336 pixels.

Just for fun, take a ruler and measure the width of this photo on your screen. On my screen 800 pixels is approximately equal to 8.14 inches. Measure this photo on your screen and it will tell you how many pixels per inch, your screen is. If this photo is larger on your screen then 8.14 inches, then your screen pixel size is smaller per inch then my screen and vice versa. e.g. if this picture measures 9 inches on your screen then you can only display approximately 88 pixels per inch (pixels per inch = 800/9) versus the 98.2 pixels per inch (=800/8.14) that I can display on my monitor because this photo measures ~8.14 inches across on my screen.

Now that you know how many pixels per inch that your screen displays, you can calculate how much space any sized photo will

take on your screen. E.G. If your screen is 88 pixels per inch and the photo is 600 pixels across then 600/88 = 6.8" of horizontal display space is used on your screen.

Just for grins, measure the vertical side of the above photo. On my screen, it measures 5.15" which means there are 103 pixels per inch horizontally. It is not unusual for there to be a difference between the pixels per inch horizontally (98.2) and the pixels per inch vertically (103.4.) This does throw a small amount of distortion into the photo but at such a small value, only the most trained eye would even notice and then it would be doubtful if they could or not. An original sized photo of 3,504 pixels would require 35.6" of viewing screen, ergo why horizontal and vertical scrolling bars were invented.

This photo is 600 pixels x 400 pixels (This is the standard 6x4 photo format or the aspect ratio you get from normal 35mm film cameras)

This resized photo is my favorite size for email. I have a high resolution (8 Mega Pixel) camera and I really enjoy conveying as much about the picture as possible without compromising quality. In another words, if I sent it in a smaller format (size) I wouldn't be able to elicit that "Wow, what a great photo." reaction from my viewers, that I love so much. If it were larger, it would look better but would take longer to download and may or may not be viewable without scrolling (using the side bar.)

400 pixels, this size is reasonable for email if you have a large quantity of photos to share or if you are more interested in transmitting content rather then details.

200

Lastly, if you look closely at the above 800 pixel picture, you will notice something under the wharf. There are actually people in Kayaks under the wharf and this makes my point of what happens when you resize to a smaller size, you lose detail. If this is a concern of yours, learn how to crop and then resize the crop to your favorite size. This one is not resized but is shown in its 1:1 format. I just happened to choose a crop of 300 pixels. and a full size 300 pixel portion of this same photo, cropped out of the original.

I hope you see the value and importance of resizing (and cropping.) It is an absolute necessity to embrace resizing your digital photos if you ever get serious about emailing or posting your photo gems on the web. (Cropping is just a fun refinement of resizing.)

BTW, if you resize to a bigger value, your picture will become "pixalated" losing lots and lots of detail. In general, you can resize photos downward without distortion but if you resize upward, your photo risks becoming pixalated and showing distortion. (Do it on purpose just for grins but don't store it. It is sometimes fun to see what pixalation will do to a photo.)

In another words, if you resized to 800 pixels, you cannot reverse the process and resize back to the original size.

When you process a photo, always store the processed photo under a different file name to prevent losing the detail and resolution of the original photo. I use a naming convention which is simply the same name as the original photo file but with a leading alpha character of "a" e.g. If the photo file name is img8125.jpg, the new resized photo file name is then assigned to aimg8125.jpg. This accomplishes two things: you prevent destroying your original photo file and you have a reference to the file you originally processed from, This makes it easy to go back in the future, to that same file with the freedom to resize to different sizes or to crop it differently without havilg lost any of its original quality.

Tip # 1
Always preserve your original photo file.
Get in the habit of archiving your photos before you process them. If you do this, you wont have to ever worry about writing over an original file. I use a 300 Gig external USB drive to save and backup my photo files on. This might work for you as well.

Tip # 2
Never overwrite an original photo file.
Resize or crop or draw mustaches on your mother in law's photo but always preserve the original. This can be accomplished by simply using "Save As" using a different file name; instead of "Save," when you store your processed photo file. See Tip #1 also.

Preserving the original photo file is the equivalent of making sure your film negatives are preserved and safe from damage. The difference is, it is really easy to overwrite an original file, so establish careful file editing and file storing or archiving procedures and then follow them. Overwriting an original photo file is permanent and irreversible. There is no utility in the world that can undo the overwrite of an original photo file.

Still having difficulty? Then email me .

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