Any resizing hurts image quality

doren — Sat, 10 Mar 2001 05:33:40 +0000

Think of it this way.

You have 4 pixels. When you resize the image to 50% Photoshop has to figure out what color to make the one pixel that is the result (remember 50% width & 50% witdth = 4 to 1).

If there is, for example, an edge where a white field meets a red field you will have subtle bluring. And that a best case shrink.

If you are going from 3 pixels to 1 pixel think of the gymnastics Photoshop must do. And of course if you go from 100% to 99% Photoshop must decide which few pixels to delete and which to average.

Same thing when you are enlarging and image. The gist of the answer is ALWAYS when you can, create images at the size they will be used in the end result.

Brian Farkas — Fri, 02 Mar 2001 00:10:32 +0000

Usually not- in fact, if you oversize the site and shrink it later, you may end up losing some quality as I believe photoshop automatically "blurs" the image if you use the resize tool. However, if you start at 300 dpi and then move down to 72 dpi in the image properties box, I don't know if that would be as much of a problem...

Personally, I just design the UI for the size of the screen it's designed to be displayed on. For most sites this will mean ~ 760 pixels wide (in order to be compatible with all 800x600 monitors)

Brian