Resizing an image

Has anyone ever sent you a photo in an email that took forever to retrieve?  Or have you been to a web page that was loaded with pictures and each one seemed to crawl as it loaded?  If you have a Cable or DSL connection you probably have and not realized it.  If you are still on a Dial-up connection you see it all the time.  If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, click HERE for an example. 

Why is resizing important?  The larger a picture is the more time it takes to send from place to place.  Also, larger pictures take up more space on your hard drive (or web page).  When you first move a picture from your camera, it's huge.  When you view it you probably have to scroll around the screen to see it all unless your picture viewing software reduces the size automatically.  But it hasn't really resized the picture, it's only made it easier to view.  If you email that picture to someone you are sending the huge photo.  And that takes time.

Resizing is probably the easiest task to master because most software does it with one click.  I'll demonstrate with our example picture.  Unfortunately, this page may load a little slow for dial up users.  I've made the images as small as I can and still keep them legible.

I've loaded in the original image which is 1280 X 960 pixels.  I literally have to scroll around to see it all.  It's pretty picture but it will take a while to email.  It's 3.5 Megabytes in size.  About 10 minutes to send on a dial-up connection.

So start by finding the RESIZE button.  Paint Shop Pro (PSP) puts it under the IMAGE menu.

When you click on RESIZE, a new menu will appear asking you what size you want the image to be. 
640 X 480 is a good size for email since you don't have to scroll around to view it on most computers.  Notice the check box near the bottom marked MAINTAIN ASPECT RATIO.  If your program has this button, keep it checked.  It insures that the photo doesn't end up tall and skinny or short and fat.

The resized image is 640 X 480.   But don't SAVE your changes yet.  If you save now you will lose the original (larger) image.  I try to keep the original image of any picture I take.  You never know when you may need it.  Also, the resized picture size has changed to 90 Kilobytes (0.09 Megabytes).  That's a lot smaller than the original picture.

Instead of SAVING the image, select SAVE AS....   This will prompt you for a new file name.  I usually append "-sm" (for small) on any resized image.  But you can name it anything you want.
We're done.  Any questions?  Like I said, I'm trying to keep this simple. 

The next section is Color Correction:  
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