Hi everybody,I'm new here, as wellas to computers and photoshop. I was hoping some one could clarify resizing for me. What is it for exactly? when and how you do it? and any thing else I should know! Thanks I'm sure this is the first of many questions. Oh yea, I have vista on my laptop.

Originally Posted by meganh Hi everybody,I'm new here, as wellas to computers and photoshop. I was hoping some one could clarify resizing for me. What is it for exactly? when and how you do it? and any thing else I should know! Thanks I'm sure this is the first of many questions. Oh yea, I have vista on my laptop.

A digital image right out of the camera these days will be somewhere between 5 megapixels and 20 megapixels. As an example, a Nikon D70 6 megapixel image is roughly 2000x3000 pixels in size. Cameras will even more megapixels obviously capture images with even larger pixel dimensions.

All those pixels help capture great image detail and allow that detail to "stand-up" even when you start printing enlargements like 8x10, 11x17, 20x30, etc... With all these pixels, these images can be large, often in the range of 1-12MB depending upon image format, type of compression, effectiveness of the compression, how many pixels, etc...

There are, however, many circumstances where all those pixels or all megabytes of size of the image get in the way. Say, for example, you wanted to send someone a copy of an image as an attachement to an email. If all they are going to do is to view that image on their 15" laptop screen and they should be perfectly fine with an image that is half as high as their screen, well they don't really need all those original pixels that you captured from the camera to accomplish that. And, in fact, if you slim the image down, it will send faster in email, open faster, take less storage in their inbox, etc... So, sometimes it's appropriate to resize the image for a particular display use. In this case, you would take the original image (let's just say it was 2000x3000 pixels) and decide that what you would like to send them is an image that's 600x900 pixels. You want them to see the whole image, but you just don't want the image expressed in as many pixels. So, you run the image through a resize operation. That resize operation takes the original image and "resamples" it so that you still see the same picture, but it's expressed in fewer pixels. There are various computer software algorithms for doing this resampling or resizing.

Now, there is no free lunch in this resizing operation. While the recipient of this smaller image will still see the same image, there will not be as much detail present in the image because the operation of reducing the number of pixels necessarily removed some detail from the image. That far away object that used to be represented by four or five pixels in the original image and had some detail showing in those four or five pixels is now represented by just one or two pixels and clearly you can't express as much detail in one or two pixels as you can in four or five.

If all the recipient is going to do is to view the image on their screen, then nothing is really lost because they probably wouldn't have been able to see that extra detail at their viewing size anyway. But, if they are going to print the image, then the lower resolution image you sent them won't print as much detail as if you sent them the original image.

These days, I don't resize an image very often. Some of the reasons for doing so are: reducing the overall file size so it's more pratical to send someone, reducing the pixel count so it's more practical to display on the web without having to scale it, make it faster to display on the web (smaller images display faster in browsers), purposefully reducing the resolution so people can see your images, but thieves can't make high quality prints, etc...

If you are a Smugmug customer, you can mostly just forget about resizing images because they do a lot of it for you. You take your picture, you download the full resolution image to your hard disk (in Elements 6 in your case), you do any modifications you might want to the image in Elements, you then upload the full resolution image to Smugmug and as part of the upload process, Smugmug automatically makes a whole ton of new sizes from your original that can be efficiently used for good web display. They make two different sizes of thumbnails and size different display sizes (S, M, L, XL, XL2, XL3). Their web-code then automatically uses the right size of a given viewer's screen. You never have to do a single resize operation - they do it all for you and you get a first rate web experience.

Let me know if you have any further questions.