Resizing Images for Printing in Photoshop

Digital photography has basically ushered in a new era for scrapbookers. While we all had the instinct to take many, many photographs in every conceivable situation, now we can do it affordably, without having to worry about the cost of film. Additionally, with digital imaging programs such as Photoshop, we can edit, retouch, crop, and add embellishments to photographs right on our computers, before ever printing them.

Digital photography takes a bit of learning, though, and acquiring prints of your new digital photographs is one of the things that makes new digital photographers scratch their heads. It can also be complicated to figure out how to handle your images to get the size of print that you want, especially when printing from your own home computer.

Considering Resolution

The first thing to understand when printing a digital image is resolution, or how ‘detailed' the information in your photograph is. Although it's more complicated than this, you basically want to know that the deeper the resolution of the image, the bigger a picture you can print and still have it look good-otherwise it will become pixelated and grainy looking. Online photo printing companies generally give these guidelines for minimum resolution to print a certain size:

• 640 x 480 : smaller than 4" x 6", such as wallet size
• 1024 x 768 : 4" x 6"
• 1152 x 864 : 5" x 7"
• 1600 x 1200 : 8" x 10" or larger (Some services suggest an even greater resolution for larger photos.)

This is good to keep in mind when printing at home, as well. Since this is something that you have to decide on when you're taking the photograph with a digital camera, keep in mind the size you'd eventually want to print the photo. For instance, when doing a photo shoot, you might want to take pictures at a resolution of 1600 x 1200, in case there's one you'd like to print and frame in a larger size. For a soccer game, you might be okay with 1024x768.

If you're scanning photographs, you can always scan them at a higher DPI if you'd like to make enlargements.

Cropping Your Photo

Before resizing your photo to the size at which you'd like to print it, you'll want to decide whether or not you want to crop it, since this will make the image smaller. You also have to take into consideration the final size and proportion you'd like your photo to be; if you want to end up with a 5" x 7" photo, you don't want to crop your image so that it turns out to be a square.

If your image already has the right proportions, hit the ‘front image' button when you're using the cropping tool. It will automatically take the information from your photo, learning its dimensions, and will then only let you crop it in the same proportion.

Resizing Your Image

Once you've cropped your photograph the way you'd like, you can use the Image Size tool to change the size of your image. The tool will start off by telling you the current size of the image. Make sure that you have the ‘constrain proportions' box checked, or else you might end up making your image look odd, either squished or stretched out. Then, all you have to do is enter the size that you'd like your image to be.

You'll be able to tell right away if you've made the image too big for the resolution to handle. If that's the case, you can always undo the resize and try again. Even if you've done a good job of resizing your image, you might want to try running filters to improve the way it looks, such as the blur or unsharp mask filters.

Using Print Preview

A quick-and-easy way to resize a photograph so that it's the right size is to use the Print Preview option. This way, you can not only specify the photo to be a certain size, but you can also decide where on the paper you would like it to print-useful if you want to print directly to a scrapbook page.

There are downsides to this option, however: it's easy to stretch an image too much and to be unhappy with the result. However, if you are familiar with the quality of the image and how much this will allow you to enlarge it, it's a fine option.

Working with photos that you plan to print might be a little tricky or confusing at the beginning, but it's something that you can learn with time and patience. Be willing to try new techniques, make mistakes, and print out that photo a second time if need be.

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