You may think that resizing an image in Photoshop is as simple as clicking Image -> Image Size…, choosing the new size of your image, then clicking OK. In some cases this works perfectly well, you can go off with your lovely sized image and live happily ever after, however, in other cases you may find that resizing your image this way degrades the quality, or the image isn’t sharp enough – fortunately, there’s a solution for this!
Available Options to Re-size Images in Photoshop
Image Resize Menu in Photoshop
So, in Photoshop there are 5 different techniques to render your image while it is being re-sized; this is called re-sampling. I will tell you how to access these options and what each one is best for. Using these different techniques can help you make your images look better when re-sized, whether you are resizing them larger or smaller. It is very useful to know what each re-sampling method does.
First of all, open your image in Photoshop – in my case it is a photo, courtesy of me, of my cat. Next, click “Image -> Image Size…“. You should see the options as per the image to the right. Towards the bottom of these options you will see it says Re-sample Image with a check box and a drop down menu. This is where you can choose any of the options mentioned later in this article.
The 5 different methods of resizing a photo in Photoshop.
1. Re-sample using the Nearest Neighbor technique.
This method will take the colour of the closest pixels either side of the new ones. and creates new pixels based on that. This method is not good for resizing photographic images, but can be great to reduce or enlarge illustrations with non-anti-aliased edges.
2. Re-sample using the Bilinear technique.
Bilinear will take samples of the pixels either side and above the new pixel. This offers more accurate and better quality that Nearest Neighbor when enlarging photographic elements. If you need to keep your hard edges, then nearest Neighbor is still the best method for you.
3. Re-sample using the Bicubic Technique.
The Bicubic technique will sample information for the new pixels by getting information from all 8 surrounding pixels. This is the best out of the Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear and Bicubic techniques for image enlargement as it gives a smoother appearance; the only issue is you will start to loose the sharpness of your image. If you want to preserve some lovely gradients, then this is a great technique to use when resizing.
4. Re-sample using the Bicubic Smoother Technique.
This method works the same as the Bicubic above except it smooths out the final result; this method is best for image enlargement.
5. Re-sample using the Bicubic Sharper Technique.
This method is the same as the default Bicubic re-sampling, except it sharpens the image after the re-size; it is best used when reducing the size of an image.
Conclusion
I have never found myself using all of these techniques, but the methods I use most often are Bicubic and Bicubic Sharper. I find that Bicubic is best when I need to shrink the size of photograph or, very rarely, to enlarge it. I then find that Bicubic Sharper is best when I need to shrink or enlarge the size of a graphical image, for example a screen shot of textual content or a bar graph. Each of the above methods has its uses, but in the end just choose whichever one looks best to you, after all – you’re the designer!
