by David Peters

If you want to resize a large photo you have to take the correct precautions to prevent losing too much resolution. Making an image smaller can make it appear blurry if you don’t do it right. This can make the picture less clear than it should be.

This is a problem in many editing programs, but Adobe Photoshop has the tools to fix this.

This method will only work in Photoshop CS and CS2. These versions are more powerful in a lot of ways, so if you don’t have them I’d recommend that you invest in a copy as you may find that you will need the more advanced features.

To make an image smaller go to Image> Image Size> Resample Image. Choose Bicubic Sharper from the resulting menu. This setting will minimize any blur that occurs when resizing the image.

When you want to make an image larger, select Bicubic Smoother.

This tool is so useful for resizing that you may want to select it as the default so that it is automatically selected when you start your Adobe Photoshop up. To do this go to Preferences> General where you can select Image Interpolation. Here you just choose Bicubic Sharper from among the selection and it should be set as your new default.

Remember that performing more than one resize on an image will give it more blur. To experiment with the size that you want, use a duplicate image as multiple resizing will ruin the original image. Once you’ve found the size you want, you can apply the dimensions to the original image.