TUTORIAL: Resizing photos

Written by Yukkabelle

Hi there

Some of our member's submissions are declined because the quality of their images are not optimized at their best.
Hopefully there are simple tricks that can be done to make your photos looking better.

So I will write a series of small basics tricks to help you to enhance the quality of your photos. The first one is about your photos size.

Uploading your photos to dA

I have noticed that many of our members are uploading their photos on Deviantart at the original size (full size)
For some many reasons it is not a good idea, and you should to prepare your photo before to upload it to the web.

Original size is a big file, a too big file. Not only it may take longer to download on other people screen, but also it makes not easy for the viewer to enjoy your image. Do you really want your watchers to scroll horizontally and vertically your image for to try to figure piece by piece what they are looking ? Certainly no !

And what about the quality ? To upload your photo at the original size and let Deviantart to resize it for you will automatically make your photo to look "soft", "dull", with a lack of contrast and details.

What size is a good size ? As far as I am concerned, I will resize my horizontal photos at 800 pixels and the vertical size will be automatically 536 pixels because I preserve the aspect ratio. So depending the size of your original photo, you may have something different.

A very important point, when you have finished to resize your image, take care of not overwrite on your original file. So save it by doing : "Save As" you can give another name to your file. You will have two files for your image, one resized and your original untouched.
Usually while saving the resized photo, I add the new size on the title. For example in jpg format :

myphotox800.jpg
Doing this will help you to locate easily your images on your computer. You will see immediately which one is the original and which one is the resized.

How to resize your photos

I have Photoshop element 5 and Photoshop cs3 but I prefer to use another easy free program for to resize my photos : Photofiltre ! I use this program since years because it has simple tools.

Photofiltre : photofiltre.free.fr
Download : photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm

The easy way to not mess with your original, it is to work on a duplicate of your image.
I did a little video to show you how I resize my photos with PhotoFiltre. The principle stays the same with Photoshop, but if you need a quick tutorial about it, just tell me.

PhotoFiltre video tutorial

For more informations I suggest you to read a very interesting and useful article from the well know and talented Ian-Plant

I hope this helps

If you have any question, feel free to ask

Marie-Agnes