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How to resize photos without losing quality


danielphoto

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Hi,

i am new to this forum, i hope to feel great and receive awesome support and time to time help other people.

I wanted to know from experts how i can resize the photos without lost of quality?

I want to use this photos on my website, with dimension of 900x600, do you suggest me to use 960x640 instead? ( i am asking this because on resize image from Photoshop shows this option, and plus i checked that many official site are using this dimension.

The problem is that when i resize to this size, the photos seems to be different, it lost his beauty. How i can export without lose this? I tried with Lightroom but is even much bad than Photoshop. So how you export the photos for internet with the best quality?

Thanks for the precious time.
Dimitri
 

Steve

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The answer is you can't up-size without some loss of quality and with a small 900 x 600 or 960 x 640 you can't down-size without a loss of quality either.

OK, I'm a little unclear of the question.

Are you saying you want to re-size from 900 x 600 to 960 x 640 or are you asking if you would get better results starting from 900 x 600 or 960 x 640?
If you're re-sizing from 900 x 600 to 960 x 640 you should see virtually no loss in quality, but I don't believe that's what you're asking.

If you're going to upsize any image you are going to degrade the quality, it's unavoidable.
You have several interpolation settings, try them all
Those are the settings in the bottom of the image size box in Photoshop like Bicubic Automatic, Bicubic Smother, etc.

Interpolation in this case really means guess.
You're asking Photoshop to guess what the new pixels will look like.

I've heard enlarging it 10% at a time until you get to the image size you're looking for works.
Don't know, never tried it, and doubt it works but you can give it a try.

If you're going to down-size you're removing data and degrading the image.

Please be more specific in your question.
Whats the original size and what's the required size.

Posting the image will help greatly

 

Tom Mann

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Another way to think about what Steve said is that one should never make changes to the pixel dimensions of a relatively small image (like yours), other than by cropping it. The image suffers (albeit for different reasons) whether you increase or decrease the pixel dimensions of small images.

If at all possible, by far, the best way to deal with requests for different size images is by working on the largest and cleanest version of the image that you have, and then, once you are done with processing it, archive the final version you come up with. Then, in the future, when you are called upon to produce smaller versions for different purposes, you only need to perform one down-rez operation, and this will always be to exactly the correct pixel dimensions and so it will be as sharp as the final pixel dimensions permit.

This is exactly how knowledgeable photographers work. Modern digital cameras always produce images that are at least 3000 or more pixels in the long direction, but they are often called upon to produce thumbnails, preview versions, versions for different web pages, etc. that are much smaller. So they use the archived full-rez version to produce each of these different sizes. This is *precisely* why the workflow in Lightroom is set up the way it is, ie, with an "export" function and export presets. Set up your presets correctly, and with only a single button press, you can produce an image of the requested size.

HTH,

Tom M
 
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What Tom said is exactly the right way, and the only one any professional Photshopper uses everyday.

DSCN4309.jpg
2400 pixel Original

DSCN4309 2400pixel.jpg
1350 pixel

DSCN4309 960pixel.jpg
960 pixel

DSCN4309 900pixel.jpg
900 pixel

DSCN4309 600pixel.jpg
600pixel

DSCN4309 400pixel.jpg
400 pixel

These examples were downsized from the original image.
No sharpening.
 
Last edited:

danielphoto

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Hi,

thank you for helping me. But i still have some confusion and will be great to fix this issue, because i really don't like to lost that much time for editing and at the end to lost all of my work...

The size of images i have is around: 5616 x 3744 ( depends if i crop something or not ).
The size i wanted for images is: 900 x 600. I am using this size, just because on my website, which is: http://imagestudio.com ( the slideshow match perfectly with this size, but in cases 960 x 640 will have better quality or some improvements for mobile, etc, i can also use it for future ).

This are the settings i am using to resize the photos to 900 x 600.
Schermata 2015-08-18 alle 18.36.08.png

I have tried to upload the full size image, but seems that maximum size i can upload is 3500 x 3500, so i have resized the image to 3500 x 2333

Photo by imagestudio.com.jpg

And finally this is the photo resized to 900 x 600 pixel.

wedding Photography by Imagestudio.com.jpg

Please let me know if i do the things correctly or what solution you suggest me to use. I have tried with Lightroom, but the image it's even worst than with Photoshop.
Thank you again so much for your efforts to help with my queries.
Dimitri
 
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Hi Daniel

I downsized your image to 900x600 pixel, and my result is exactly the same as yours.
I cant's see any difference in quality. So your workflow is OK.
If you use this size for the internet reduce the resolution from 300 ppi to 72 ppi.

Bildschirmfoto 2015-08-18 um 20.37.40.jpg
 

MrToM

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Just to save any more confusion for the OP...

...If you use this size for the internet reduce the resolution from 300 ppi to 72 ppi...
That doesn't make any difference chris to be honest.

Resolution is only required if the image is to be printed....for any 'digital' output it has absolutely no effect.....it could be 1ppi or 100000ppi....makes no odds.

Regards.
MrToM.
 

danielphoto

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Thank you really guys, because this things caused me few problems and i lost some time to resize the photos for internet.

The first problem was when i found that in Lightroom the photos was loosing lot of quality and i was trying with Photoshop and here the things was gone better, but again i was checking the photos and i saw the difference in quality.

Did you see that in photos i posted, the 900 x 600 resized photo seems to have too much contrast, usually not the normal one i have in the largest image, this sounds very strange to me. More i resize the photo, more detail and contrast i have on it, and to be honest i don't like this to much. In Lightroom the things are going to change, because here the image tend to lost the details.

To be honest i am a little confused of the best process to resize a photo in 900 x 600 pixels. I just realized one big things till here, that it will be great if i will have another resize to upload on Facebook, probably of about 3000 largest pixel, what you think? Which is the maximum i can keep here for Facebook?

Thanks again for the great answer, i start to feel good on this forums with you guys, and will be my first choice to solve similar issue.
Best regards,
Dimitri
 

Tom Mann

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Hi Daniel -

Your statement that resizing in LR is not as good as resizing in PS tells me that you are doing something wrong in LR. Thousands of pro photographers (myself included) use LR daily to down-size (aka, "down-rez") images with absolutely no problem. In fact, to be honest, it is so easy to do in LR and produces such good results, I probably down-rez in LR to produce output for customers than I down-rez in PS.

I can't tell what is going wrong for you in LR, but you made a statement about increased contrast that might provide a clue. The contrast should not change, but the sharpness (which might look like contrast to you) might change. Specifically, you might be over-sharpening the image in LR. Here is what my Lightroom export dialog box looks like for the custom export preset I have set up to use to produce small, down-rez'ed images for this forum. I circled the area dealing with sharpening. Your sharpening should only be set to "none", "low", or possibly, "standard". If you go any more than that, then your images may look over-sharpened. Experiment with this setting on some of your images and see if it improves matters.

Tom M
 

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danielphoto

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Thank you. This helped me a lot! I want to ask another question, what about if i wanted to add images on Facebook? Which size you suggest me to use? I think to use the maximum size Facebook allows. So which size you are using?

Best regards,
Dimitri
 

Tom Mann

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To be blunt, I *HATE* FB.

I hate the psychologically manipulative way they acquire private information from people, particularly, kids.

I hate the way they completely ignore requests from photographers, both pro and amateur to allow some higher quality options instead of compressing the living daylights out of images, particularly, the reds.

I hate the way that they make ordinary users think they are FB's customers, when in actuality, FB's real customers are the firms who advertise using FB.

... and, so on, all the way down to the level of things like them refusing to remove the dark mask at the bottom of cover images, and making that mask even darker on their iPhone app. It completely ruins carefully crafted pix.

Unfortunately, I am forced to deal with FB because of one of my clients.

OK ... now that I got that off my chest, for ordinary pictures that you post (ie, not cover photos, not your profile photo), my recommendation is that you upload the largest pixel dimensions that they will accept, and make sure the "High Quality" box is checked. I did some checking and testing a couple of years ago, and tried some of the recommendations you'll see on the web (eg, upload only PNGs, upload nothing larger than 2048 px, etc.). I found no difference when following any of the usual recommendations. YMMV.

Tom M
 

danielphoto

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You are right Tom. I hear also about that Facebook delete also the metadates from the photos, and this is also a bad thing. I thinked that Facebook allows even bigger size than 2048, so this is the maximum i can upload for better quality?

Thanks again for all of your helps guy, the replies was saved me few hours of work.
Dimitri
 

Bryen6611

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Is there any way that we can increase the pixels of a picture for example a pic has 450x690 resolution so my question is If make a new psd and assign 900x1366 is this going to work?
can't afford to lose the quality but badly in need that picture in bigger resolution.
 

Tom Mann

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Hi Byren - Welcome to PSG. The answer to your question was given at the beginning of this thread: You can do it, but it won't look as good as if the image started with the larger dimensions and no re-sizing was needed. Whether or not the quality loss will be acceptable to you, only you can say, but there are differences between up-rez'ing techniques. For example, trees like fractal up-rezing, whereas graphic designs with hard edges at 0 and 90 degrees like the nearest neighbor method. So, if it is important, have someone who experienced in such things do it for you.

Assuming that you meant 1380, not 1366 pixels for the new long dimension, or you can crop off a bit of the picture after it's doubled in linear dimensions, then you are increasing the number of pixels by 4 times. Usually, this means that three out of every 4 pixels in the new (ie, larger) image will be guesses made by the software. No software can know what all those new pixels should really look like, so it tries to make reasonable guesses. In the case of up-rez'ing by exactly 2x in the linear dimensions, the number of "guesses" is a bit lower (only 2 out of every 4 px) because of coincidences in the locations of the new pixels, but there's still guess work involved.

If you can, why don't u post the image and we'll see what we can do with it.

Tom M
 

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