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Lesson Info

Day 9: Resolution, File Size, Resizing

welcome back today is a very important topic because it's something we do all the time in photo shop and if you this is one of these things where if you start on the wrong foot it kind of sets the tone for everything that makes life a lot more difficult and we're talking about image size and resolution and a file size and re sizing and all those kinds of things now in the original days of photo shop we only really worry about printing because that's what we did with photo shop is we scan things in and thought about what resolution to scan how many dots per inch we're going toe print out and then individual inkjet printers came along that changed things slightly and then we had on swing things like power point and finally we have the web which changes things completely again so time to change a little bit and it really changes the importance of how we decide on things like how big a file do we need and the first thing we need to talk about is just one of my favorite expressions in photo...

shop is always thinking backwards so if you were starting on a project where you're creating something whatever it might be and you're to try and decide how big should I make this well you need to think backwards from the end results so for example if you know that you're printing it as a magazine cover in a traditional go out to a printing press kind of environment that's gonna need a fairly large size we will do that as opposed to video or a slide slide show like power point or web design now if there's even the remote possibility that you need to create something for multiple purposes then without any question start with the biggest size you possibly could need one of the standard rules of photo shop is you can always size something down without losing inequality unless you're sizing a huge amount down and you'll notice a slight difference but there's a big between that and taking something that small and making it bigger so if the on ly version of something you have is like a psd follow the logo that's this big the chances are you're not going to be able to enlarge it up to a magazine size without being pretty unhappy about the quality so that suggests that when you're capturing the image we need to be also conscious of that and what I mean by that is if you're the one taking the photographs then shoot at the highest quality you can and your camera so whether that's super high j peg or raw the largest file you can bigger is better in this case not ultimately if all you're going to use it for is on the web a small size but again if you know there's even a small possibility of needing something larger it's always best to start large and make it smaller there is software out they're photoshopped conduit to some degree and there's third party software that will what I would say make its best effort to enlarge something much much bigger but it's never going to be the same quality as if they're starting with ah large original now in photoshopped cs six and again in photo shop see see there have been some tweaks to the command called immense size and photoshopped that works on that so there's a bit of an improvement in the sense of making something bigger but again ultimately if we were to compare side by side there's no comparison really bigger is better now in a pinch if all you have is a small photo and someone needs that much bigger for some purpose than well yeah you can large enlarge it make it bigger but again the quality will never be is good and I guess to some degree it depends on the photo if it was like a cloudy sky that you were gonna put faded out in the background then I'd be okay with enlarging that pretty dramatically but if it's an architectural photo of a building where those edges need to be very sharp that's where you'd notice the difference so first things first let's talk about just some of the terminology all here in the printing world traditional printing when you go out to a printing company they will say we need so many dots per inch and typically three hundred dots per inch would be considered probably the most common number used for printing although you will find that occasionally people will use numbers a little lower than that but anything higher than that if you have a file that ends up being higher quality than that it's really not going to make any improvement to the quality all it does is make the file size bigger and that's another important note that the bigger the file and the higher the resolution of course the bigger the file size will be which just means everything takes up more room and takes longer and so on if you're printing to your own ancient printer than you basically have to establish what is a good number for your printer the thing that throws people off with inkjet printers and even to some degree laser printers is the printer itself will be labeled to say this is a six hundred dp I printer or a fourteen forty dp I or a twenty eight eighty d p I or something like that and really that's just describing the technology behind the printer that really doesn't help us in any way to determine what kind of quality to use from a resolution standpoint is in photo shop we talk pixels per inch not dots bridge so dots bridges the output device pixels per inch is the number that we're going to use to try and get the best quality from that output device so if you're sending out to a commercial printer use whatever they tell you if they say we need three hundred dp I didn't send him three hundred d p I if you can or whatever the closest you can get to that we'll see later exactly what I mean by the closest you can get if it's your own inkjet printer than my suggestion is the best thing to do is just do a quick test take a typical photograph with some nice detail in it and on the same page we're going toe print out multiple images and also maybe print separate versions so for example you might send one to your ink jet that's three hundred pixels per inch and then two fifty and then two hundred and then one fifty and look at them and find out compare and I think you'll find that there's not a huge difference in fact for many people between two hundred pixels operation three hundred it's almost in perceivable most people I think come up with a number or a range of numbers that they feel comfortable using on their ancient for example based on past trial error I used two hundred forty pixels per inch as my kind of target number which would be ideal but in a pinch if the best I can get with what I'm starting with is two hundred or even a little less it's still ok it's still print's fine one of things that that surprises people to know is when for example you see trade show booth and you're looking at it from far away the resolution of that original file that was printed could have been a slow was eighty fifty pixels per inch because you're not looking at it this close you're looking at from afar so it it all so that also makes a difference but again just to clarify if you're sending out to some commercial printing press and I'm not talking about labs that do one off kind of prints we'll talk about the second but printing press see what it says on their website there are lots lots of place for example you can print business cards or postcards and they usually have a page that says send us this size of file or in some cases in many cases in fact they actually have a template you can download as a psd file that already has the right size and resolution and even has some guides as to where to put things now if you're sending out to a a lab to get prints done where you're just getting prints or canvas or printing on metal that I would use the same concept look on their website and see what they say in terms of ideally we need this size in terms to be able to get the quality we need so we'll say if you want a thirteen by ninety king friend sent it to us in this size now don't be surprised if some of those labs just tell you the pixel dimension sometimes I'll just say we need to file that's three thousand pixels by four thousand pictures and there have been resolution doesn't enter into it because that's the other way to think about the size and quality of a file is the image in terms of pixel dimensions and we'll look at that as we go so if you're the one capturing and you capture large you can always bring it down and we can use photoshopped to kind of help us figure out how much information we need to look like what take a look at what I'm talking about here so here's an image is a stock photo that I grabbed from somewhere and it's a particular size I've opened it in photo shop and I used the command that says fit on screen and at the top it says sixty two point one percent that means it's been scaled down to I'm looking at it at sixty ish percent of its original size well what does that really mean for me one of things that it means I need to find out how much information do I really have to work with and the command will spend the most of our time with in here is image size now in previous versions of photo shop before cc you wouldn't see this preview you would just see the number so the numbers still work the same way if you have photoshopped c c we have the added bonus of a preview area which could give us some feedback and this dialog box can be made much larger I'm going to keep it fairly small so it looks more like previous words a photo shop for those who do not photoshopped cc so for the most part it's gonna look a little bit different in earlier versions but the concept is still the same so when I go to image size couple things were happening here is telling me the size of this image in terms of file size is three point seven four megabytes its dimensions it's fourteen hundred pixels by nine hundred thirty three and that is confirmed down here now if I decide that I want to make it smaller maybe that's too big for a website I I simply want to say no I've determined that the size I need is ten twenty four I type in that size and it does the math and says while the height will be this and now you'll see my image size has decreased from three point seven four two two megabytes which frankly is still pretty big for a web graphic but then on top of that we would save as a j peg with different compression and someone but for now the biggest thing is this is just allowing me to say resize it down so if that's all I want to do I'd click okay and now if I do fit in window again you see I'm seeing a little close to the original size because it's now smaller pixel dimension based on my viewing area that's how I'm going to get for a while this command was gone it was brought back in and I apologize I can't member now if it was either see essex or see see I think it might have been c c but print size means how if I was to print this how big would it print that will become mohr useful when we look at some other examples if I look at one hundred percent size that just means make sure that this number up here says one hundred but that I won't be able to see the entire photograph on my screen so we talked about in previous lessons I very often I find myself switching between fit on screen so I can see the entire image to get an idea of where things are whenever I'm making decisions about the quality of things and things of that nature that I'm going to look at it one hundred percent size just to make sure that I'm not being misled by screen quality because whenever you're looking at things on screen like this on this fit onscreen view sometimes the quality suffers just a little bit so again the first thing to keep in mind is this everything we do here is determined by what we're starting with so if I have for example a camera raw file and open that in raw let's first of all take off this quality so this is saying that the weii this image was captured was with a five point one megapixel camera if I click okay just a little bit and then open it and then go to image size and only use the keyboard shortcut command option iron control all I it's telling me well this is a bigger file it's fourteen point seven megabytes and it's twenty seven eighty four by eighteen eighty four sorry came and read eighteen forty eight pixels and again I could change that so how does this factor in when for example I want to send this out somewhere as a print well one of things we can do is use thie knew dialog box as kind of a calculator so if I do a new file and I say okay I want a ten by eight at three hundred because that's the quality that my printer has determined it's telling me I need a file of twenty point six megabytes so let's click okay and do a bit of comparison let's see what we've got when we look att image size for this one it's saying it's three thousand by twenty four hundred at twenty point six megabytes if I look at the photo that I want to use it's too small first of all write from looking at the image size I can see that I really need twenty megabytes worth of information and I've got fourteen and I need considerably higher pixel dimensions and I only have a smaller one so just to clarify that if I were to take this image and compare it on the screen if either both in fit and window view they both kind of look similar but the little giveaway is look up at the top here saying this one is at thirty one percent and this is a twenty four percent so that's giving me a pretty good hint that if I copy this over to here it's not going to be big enough now the question comes up with this point could I physically use free transform and scale this up to fit and the answer is I could but I'm going to lose a bit of quality how much quality well it depends how much we're scaling it up but even if you only scale it up a little bit you are going to lose some quality now I've heard people say things like as long as you're scaling it less than ten percent you're not going to lose quality and technically that's not true what they probably should be saying is if you're scaling it just a little bit the change in quality will be less obvious but there will be some loss of quality because we're forcing photoshopped to say it was this big I need you to make it bigger and kind of invent some pixel information here and there to make it look good so if I came back here and free transformed this up to fill up the image doesn't look horrible it's not bad but it's not quite as sharp it's not going to print quite is nicely and again depending what it is that maybe okay but this concept of using the new dialog box as kind of a calculator to say well if I want to print this big how much information do I need now as I mentioned some labs are now giving it just in pixel information so they're just saying if we change to pixels they say as long as you give us a file that's three thousand by twenty four hundred pixels this number really hasn't has nothing to do with look what happens here I've got three thousand pixels by twenty four hundred pixels and it says image sizes twenty points six megabytes if I change this resolution down to seventy two it's still twenty point six megabytes because what we're doing is saying I want this much pixel information the resolution just means how big will it print in terms of quality but it's still this much information so that the resolution number when you're looking at pixel dimensions really has less of an influence than people think so just to show you the difference that's open this one make a new document and then make another new document and this case go to three hundred and so let's look at the two of them so here's the first one I created and the second one when we go to image size and again amusing that shortcut I didn't mention it before command option I or control all I for image size still saying twenty points it's megabytes three thousand by twenty four hundred by look at the other one use the same thing it's still exactly the same so what is the difference well the only real difference and it could be tough to see here but if I go to print size there's going to be a slight difference between them that one would appear to print bigger because when the resolution smaller it means physically will print larger on a page but as I mentioned before the main reason for using this kind of method of measuring file size is when a company like a lab says as long as you send us three thousand by twenty four hundred pixels that's all I need it doesn't matter to them whether it's three hundred or seventy two or one fifty they'll do that math in their facility because you've given them enough pixel information toe work with so I would say mohr and mohr companies are starting to use pixel dimension and or file size they say as long as you send me twenty megabytes worth of information that's fine or they'll say again as long as it's three thousand by twenty four hundred pixels that's enough and you'll still see some places more likely in the traditional printing press where they'll say yeah no I need a eight by ten at three hundred or whatever the numbers are and they'll use thie dots per inch resolution as their method of measurement so it really is just different ways of describing the same thing the key thing for us to remember is we need to make sure we have more than enough not too little so if the math says if that little new document calculator says I need twenty megabytes worth of information and the best I have is five megabytes is not going to print very well or I'm not going to be able to fulfill the size that I need so that's why right at the top I said if you have the control over it which hopefully most of you do and you're capturing photographs capture the biggest size you can the price you're gonna have to pay is storage space but again I would happily have have to go and buy another hard drive to give myself more options let's put it this way I would hate for this to happen where you think ok one just taking a bunch of photos that are going to be on a web site so you switched your camera too medium quality j peg which in effect means all my images are a maximum of this big and then as you're taking the photograph you get that killer shot that you love so much and maybe the school you're shooting forces we'd love to make it into a poster and you're like yeah no it's this big that would be really really sad but it could happen because again you can't force resolution to be or file size to be bigger without paying some price in this case the prices lower quality so it's something to be aware of now let's go back and look at some more examples of working with image size here so I'm going to open up these two files here's another example where on the screen it looks like pretty much the same thing because I've said open these two and change the view to fit on screen but the couple of clues that you'll notice here again look at the size up here seventy two point four percent versus eleven percent so the smaller the number is here that means the bigger the file size it is because it's so big that it has to scale it down dramatically to fit on the screen so here's where we could start to see the difference I wanna work on this photograph to do some portrait retouching for example so I press commander control one for one hundred percent and that's the largest I can get so if I wanted to work on her eyes or her teeth or anything else is not a lot of work that needs to be done here on this boat of lauren but as I now I'm a two hundred percent nine three hundred percent now four hundred percent you see it's pretty tough to make realistic decisions about here about anything here because as I zoom and further it becomes more and more pixel eyes because I'm pushing it past the point of size that makes any sense so let's look at the image size just to clarify this is a small file it's one point two megabytes it's five thirty by eight hundred which by the way would look fantastic on facebook but when I'm trying to zoom in to do further work it's not giving me a lot of room to play compare that with this one and I'm gonna press commanding control one for one hundred percent wow look at the difference because the quality of this image is so much higher it's version of one hundred percent means I can zoom in really really close and see very high quality and make all kinds of decisions so let's try to make her teeth look the same size and see I can't even do it and I start to see this little pixel grade so I met six hundred percent and I'm I've got this pixel grade showing this one I'm not one hundred percent everything sharp and crisp and clear so here's the next point is important to make maybe you want on lee a new image is going to be on facebook so having a height of eight hundred pixels is more than enough but initially when you're working on the file I would much rather have this kind of quality I'd rather be able to go in and say yes I can zoom in closer now I'm making more accurate decisions about things and then once I'm finished and we as we talked about in another session have our master file that's this big now along with saving us a j peg to take away any layers and make it that flattened version for facebook I would also be going in and making another version of that which is smaller yet so I'm gonna have my master file psd which is my full size with all the layers I'm going to save a flattened version which is j peg which is still going to be quite large larger than I need for something like facebook or any online use so I will take that and use image size to make it smaller yet now there's one danger and I hold my hand up saying the person I used to be guilty of this all the time because I could when I first got a really good scanner and I would scan in voter grasses before the days of digital photography I would scan it in a really high resolution and I would zoom in and I would see someone's eye this big on my screen and I'd be zoomed in all the way and I'd take a tool and start removing little bits of red you know in their eye and I would start tweaking this and I start painting eyelashes and I'd be spent I'd spend way too much time zoomed in that close because that won't happen is when I printed it there I that I'm seeing this big on the screen is this big on the print and I realized no one else except me could see that because I was zoomed in so close because I could be that zoomed in that close in photo shop that I was artificially seeing everything really big now if you know you're going to print a poster where it will be big that's fine but again if you're ultimately going to say this is someone's head shot that they're going to print this big or use on their website this big you don't want to go overboard with zooming in so close and obsessing over every little detail so here's a little trick that I use all the time that I think you might wantto take a look at the clothes the smaller one for now so here's this large one again it is a large file it's forty six megabytes way larger than I'll probably already need any that I'll probably need at any point but here I'm still going to work on this one because that it gives me the opportunity to do that nice zoom in and work but I don't want to kill myself by having it you know zoomed in so far like I just described that I'm being distracted so one method that works really nicely and it tends to work best if this is the on ly file you have open it doesn't have to be but it works best this way is you go to the window menu and under arrange you'll see there's a command that says new window four and then it'll say the name of your file now this is not duplicating the images making a second view in a second window of the same image so we do that and then we go back to arrange and then there's a command called tile so I'm going to change it to two up vertical which is means they'll go side by side so what you do is on one of them let's pick this one this one I'm going to zoom in really close to start working on our teeth but the one on the right I'm going to keep closer to let's say we're going to use it on facebook and it will be around this size then I'm going to change my view so that any change I make on the zoomed in view it will reflect over here now not that you would ever do this but I want you to be able to see what I'm doing if I on this image take my paintbrush and I have a small little brush and I obviously you wouldn't paint with black on a tooth but just to make a point I make that very obvious change there you could barely see it over here and imagine obviously we wouldn't paint with black we would be lightning or adjusting and that's kind of the point is that if you're spending all your time looking at this incredibly large zoomed in view you may be tempted to make all kinds of little changes that you can't even see at this smaller size so for example I've seen people looking around and they're like oh there's a little tiny and they start worrying about tiny little blemishes in the skin texture that you really frankly will not see so you have to kind of train yourself to say okay I'm gonna look at her eye but is there anything really obvious you know little small lines I mean yes I could go in and adjust all of those but are you really going to see them over here so this method what it allows you to do is we're again creating a second view not a not duplicating the document that's really important second view of the same document one we zoom into a working view we want but we keep the second view in amore reasonable size and it basically helps us keep things in context so we're not again wasting all this time adjusting little tiny tiny details that the human eye can't even detect so once you're finished then you close one or the other of them and you'll end up with just the one file and then you'll save this one so let's imagine for a moment that I have worked on this and I have a couple of retouching layers will talk later class about how I would actually do this kind of thing and will say that I am going to save this as the master file which is our psd file with layers everything else as is so that's my master file now I want to do that idea of going save as and we're gonna call this give it some other names that don't overwrite the one that's already there now first all this is going to do is removed the layers so if I open that file you see the only real difference is our original file is eighty six megabytes because we have the layers in there the j peg version is considerably smaller but it's still quite large so I opened that one and then go to my image size command and again we're still really really big so this comes to our next part is how do we re sais something down if it is too big howto I tell it I want it to be smaller and here is where we choose both do we want to re sample or not and how do we want to re sample so here the options that are available to you if you just set it on automatic that's actually not a bad choice at all because that means it will use the method of re sampling depending on whether you're getting smaller or larger if you know very specifically for example in this case I know I'm going to get smaller I'm going to reduce the size then I could choose by cubic sharper again there's the let's put it this way the last two versions of photo shop for autopsy a six and cc do it automatic is new it wasn't there before you have to always choose the setting whether you want to go bigger or smaller so if you have an older version of photo shop you have to go in and pick one of them if you have automatic as an option that's fine to use so I'm gonna put it on automatic it's forty six megabytes this is my j peg version remember and I say well all I really need is nine hundred pixels per inch for facebook or whatever it is now this is new in cc just very nice which is a preview so you can see it's still looks very nice I'm not losing any kind of quality but the file size has gone down dramatically now it's gone from forty six megabytes to one point five three megabytes and telling me it's now this size this photo shop sisi has a nice interesting menu to where if you need to you can create some specific size so you know that you're always re sizing something to fit a particular dimensions you khun pick from one of these or create your own preset for that so when we click okay the main thing that happens it looks much smaller on the screen because now it is a smaller dimension of the go back to image size now it's that size and once again I would now be saving this as some other name so I know now you may not need to do that I mean this is a personal preference because if you have that master psd file when you save that first j peg you may decide I don't need to keep two of them so this part's up to you and I'm going to suggest in this particular scenario I want to keep a large and make another smaller one this side so now that I've resize this one down I'll do need this file and save it who take a different name apparently wait so now when we go toe look see we have there's that file it's only three hundred ninety six case we've gone from eighty six megabyte with our original layered photoshopped file down to a three hundred and ninety six k file that's gonna load and display much more quickly now to be honest about this worrying about file size for web type stuff is a lot less of the worry that it was years ago because in the early days of the web in fact I still remember having discussion with someone and keep in mind I was coming from the print world where we were worried about files being like one hundred megabytes for print and a small file would have been twenty megabytes and I remember sitting in my first session discussing with a graphic designer this new thing called the web and at that point because everyone was on dial up modems they said yeah it's gonna be a pretty small file like say eight k and I remember thinking he must have misspoken he meant eight megabytes but no he meant an eight k so imagine trying to take a photo that by nature was this big and twenty megabytes and somehow make it eight k so all I can say is thankfully we don't have to worry about that anymore because with today's internet and cable access and everything else file size is nowhere near as important obviously we still wanted to be smaller rather than overly large but the same time it's less of a concern than it used to be but this scenario is fairly typical you open the file as bigas you can based on how it was captured you do your work on that one keeping in mind though that we don't want to mislead ourselves by zooming in too far and working on details that the human eye can't even see but keep that big master file do that maybe that double window thing and then we're going toe save a copy in our main size in the news image sized to make it even smaller so emphasize that's one of its main functions is to what is its main function really is to alter the size of what you have and what you can do with it so here's let's go back to our original again because I opened this initially well this is the way it came in and saying the pixel dimensions are thirty two forty six by forty nine twenty eight you can also view it in other measurements like well how does this relate to inches so for example let's say now we were concerned with printing this on our inkjet printer well I want to figure out how big can I print this on my ink jet without losing quality right now it's telling me in theory I could print a sixteen by twenty four lessons rounded off but assuming that my resolution is two hundred pixels per inch as I mentioned before on my in chip in her I liked at least have two hundred forty so how do I figure out how big a file size I can print in this case I do not want to re sample re sample means decrease the file size in this case I want the file size to say the same I want to alter these numbers so if I uncheck re sample image that means now you see all these three numbers are linked together so if I change any one of these factors they will all changed over example on my inn chet I want two hundred forty so that tells me the biggest size I could print is thirteen by twenty which is pretty good because of thirteen by nineteen is the big size I can put on my inkjet printers that means this is a big enough file but let's pause for a second and look at this look at it the other way around in order to be able to print a thirteen by nineteen at two forty I needed forty six megabytes worth of information so if the on ly photograph that I have is ten megabytes well guess what you can't print a thirteen by nineteen to forty so there's a couple different ways of calculating what you can do we can use that new dialog box that kind of figure out how big a filed why need or you can open a file look a image size and say well this is how much information I have let me massage those numbers a little bit to say if I change the resolution to this what will that allow me to do in terms of size so the part that usually throws people off a little bit is this reese ample butt so let's go back to this for a second anytime you've been playing around in a dialog box in photo shop and you want to kind of resets something see where it says cancel here if I hold down option or all cancel changes to reset and I can put things back the way they were so at first usually it comes in looking like this saying re sample whatever meth in this case automatic and these were the original numbers so here's how you make the decision if you have a large file and you wish to make it smaller and you're going to ultimately probably make a copy of it then you have re sample checked because you're saying I want you to readjust this to make it a smaller size either by changing the pixel dimensions that's usually the most common way so let's say I want to make this three thousand pixels hi now it's saying while filling the width for you and now the image size saying it I was forty six now I'm seventeen so shook clicking this re sample or keeping it check means I want to decrease the size of the image the image size the number of pixel information megabytes is smaller than it was before now let's reset that again if on the other hand I decided well they told me that in order to print this humongous canvas I needed to be five thousand pixels wide well now this is a very different scenario because now it's saying well it was forty six megabytes now it's one hundred eight so this is what I was talking about before when I said you don't really wanna reese I something bigger than the original because in this case what's gonna happen is that's more than double the size it originally wass but whenever I increased the size that dramatically photoshopped does this thing called interpellation which is a fancy word for saying invent pixel information to try and fill it and make it look okay but if I was to click okay to this it will do it's math and I think you'll find that what's gonna happen is while technically now it's the right size it's not gonna look very good so if I go to one hundred percent size it's not bad but the quality is not as good and honestly this is actually better than it was a few versions ago a photo shop but technically this quality is still not as high so when someone's asked the question can I make this image bigger the answer really is well technically yes you could go into image size and tell it to be larger but should you is probably a better question because in a pinch of that's all you've got then it will be okay but as you said before starting large and getting smaller that's going to serve you much better so let's look at it at a typical kind of a situation we've got someone sends us a file and we'll just say it's this one here I have no idea about any information except the name of the file iss small camera jpeg ok let's check it out wow that is small I mean the fact when it opened up the first thing I did was looked up here and said one hundred percent that means this is really small let's see how small it is yep it's in inches but even if we put it in well you can see up here is only two hundred pixels by one fifty now if that was going to be a little tiny graphic on a website great no problem but someone says no we need to print that eight by ten oh you do do you well let's just see what will happen in this case I need to tell it guess what it needs to be much much bigger we needs to be not point six six inches but ten inches and now it's saying well I was eighty seven k now I'm nineteen megabytes and again in photo shop cc you can see it's giving you a preview to go yeah that's just not gonna cut it that's a hugely dramatic increase and no matter how much the software is increased that's such a large increase that that's probably not going to serve you very well at all so what do you do in a case like that well in all seriousness the first thing I would do is say to the person who's any of that do you have a bigger one sent me the biggest one you got because you're gonna be better served by having mohr pixel information so I happen to have a bigger one and right away it looks more promising because and fit in screen view it's still only twenty five so now I go to image size to see what I really have okay I've got tons of information so I can actually go to an eight by ten without any problem and that's just to get illustrate the difference between having enough information and not having enough information so what we've been talking about right now up until now is changing the image size by saying look at the dimensions that are already there and just massage those numbers up or down which is quite different than things like cropping which we'll talk about separately because cropping is saying I want to cut out part of the image toe only display a different area now the other way that we can resize things in photo shop which is a little bit different is to say I want to keep everything else the way it is in terms of when we look att image size I still wanted to be twenty eight sixteen by twenty one twelve or whatever it is I want seventeen megabytes were the information but I want to actually scale down the graphic within this size and that's different image size means massage the overall pixel information this the next thing want talk about is how do you resize within a document and is by transforming so let's do it this way I'm going to make a new document and we're going to say this is uh something I'm doing for maybe a video so it's twelve eighty by seven twenty is the size I don't really need to worry about the resolution as much click okay so there's the size that I want so when I go to image size it's still saying okay it's two point six four megabytes not really that important it's twelve eighty by seven twenty which is important and the case you really want to know and shows you the inches but that's not important either now I take this large camera and I'm gonna drag and drop it onto my image and it's much much bigger because it was coming from a bigger file so I can't even see the whole thing so one of things you'll find that often happens and we talked about this a little bit when he talked about the difference between opening and dragging over and placing that because I just drag this over it brought in as its full size of course I could move it around but what I really want to do is free transform whenever you do free transform that's gonna put transformation handles on the outside of however big this is while because this is so big one of the tricks you learned fairly quickly and photo shop is free transform and then almost immediately if not immediately go change your view to fit on screen that way you can see where the handles are now when you're transforming something with free transform it's important to note a couple of things by default it's not proportional that's really important you would almost expect it would be I would think that you would think most of time and you want to transform something smaller you want it to keep its proportions but in photoshopped that doesn't happen you have to hold down the shift key and when you drag one corner towards the other one it's scales it down in proportion but if you wanted to not that we would in this case you can also go to a corner and kind of squished things or goto's one corner and you can see it's not in proportion so I'm going to escape out of that hit free transform again one of the other shortcuts that you'll find the things very useful when you're doing this kind of re sizing and transformation is the shift key is going to keep it proportion but you see it's only going from the top right corner towards the bottom left corner which would mean if I wanted to re sizes to fit this image I'd have to drag this corner and then come down here and drag this corner which would work but frankly it's a lot easier to throw in a different key so the shift key is going to keep it proportion the option are all key has been a scale towards the center that reference point in the center so I'm holding down two keys shift and option are all now in one motion I can just drag towards the center and say yes I want that to be this big now when I fit in my window view now I've got this layer that I can play with but it's important to remember that the image size didn't change because the canvas if you will in which I was placing or dragging in this photo of the photograph I'm sorry the photograph of the camera that part hasn't changed I'm still it's still twelve eighty by seven twenty but whenever you bring over image from a bigger files going to be way too big and when you free transformed down you're going to be scaling it down to fit and just like when we talked about scaling the documents eyes itself the same theory applies to free transform it's much better you're going to get a much better quality to transform something down to a smaller size then to try and make something bigger by transforming it up let's compare if we find our small little camera and drag it into this file it's really small and if I attempt to scale this up to make it the same relative size more or less even see yeah not even close so again this is to stress the same point and because I don't want you to fall in the trap where someone will just make it bigger well you have to be careful about making things bigger because when you make things larger either through image size for the overall image or on a layer by layer basis of free transformation you're going to lose some quality again if you're transforming up just a little bit maybe it's not so important but in a case like this you can see quite clearly look at the difference again between them that's a huge difference in quality I would not be very happy with that the on ly thing that I might consider doing as if I was going to take this graphic and make it so faded out I could barely see it and then put something else over the top of it in a pinch maybe that would work but realistically not so much so when you have the choice think about your end result and think well I want to end up with a camera that looks this big on this size of file but I want to make sure I don't lose inequalities I want to bring it in big enough to make sure it works so the same theory is going to apply regardless either way it's always the same so the functions were going to spend the most of our time with for now image size is the one where we're overall adjusting the images and says the size of the image and again remember it's do you have to decide do I want to re sample it down to say I need a smaller size for some purpose or am I saying I actually need to readjust thes number to change the resolution to say well if I for example if I was going to print this on my in check I still want to know what's the best I can do so I'm gonna uncheck re sample put in two hundred forty pixels per inch and that's going to do the math for me and tell me it's approximately twelve by nine he's not quite exactly that but that's kind of how we use this math when you do this when you uncheck re sample and massage these numbers you should not expect anything tto happen visually this is let's go back a step on dh show you what I mean let's use well I guess we could still use the same one but I just want to clear out some of this other information that's distracting me on about you but it's distracting me and since I'm the one at the controls here guess what I'm gonna make it happen come on okay there we go all right so this one is it's telling me okay it's twenty five percent I'm gonna do fit in window view and it's saying twenty seven point four percent ok so we go to image size and the first scenario I decide yes I do want it smaller I want it to be instead of nine inches I wanted to be six inches and then it tells me the pixel dimensions anytime you see again in brackets wass and then this number is smaller that means it's going to reduce the size when I click okay you'll see even on the screen it's scaled it down one to go to fit on screen now that percent is has changed so that's whenever you're re sampling to make it smaller even on the screen you'll notice a visual chain if I go back and make it even more obvious and say I want it to winch is really really small now when I go toe fit on screen it's actually bigger than one hundred percent so I would go commander control one for one hundred percent you can see that's how big it's going to be so that's what happens when you re sample you're going to see a visual difference on the screen let's revert this go back to fit on screen and once again go back to image size but in this scenario now I'm saying I want to see how big I can print it on my ink jet so I hit re sample image and I type in let's for the sake of argument due to twenty five just so you'll see it's a more obvious thing so now it's saying I could do twelve by nine ish but here's the key thing up of the top this number doesn't change so when I click okay nothing happens I mean it actually did happen but visually nothing happens and that's important because I see people do that and they go to change something and think why did nothing change well actually it did but it changed behind the scenes and the numbers so that when I print it will now be the correct resolution for putting on my in check but visually nothing changed because it's still the same file size it's still seventeen megabytes worth of information I've just massage the numbers to make it print differently so when you I have re sample check you should see something happened visually on the screen where when you click okay it will either look smaller or bigger or something will happen to the display on your screen when you choose to not re sample just reorganized the pixels nothing will happen visually and that's one of the factors that often throws people off is there expecting something to change the only time you'll see something changes when you re sample it down to a smaller size okay so let's go through another example here I have a photograph that I previously worked on its a j pegs that means it's not a raw file I don't have the raw right here in front of me I actually do but for the sake of argument let's say I don't so this is kind of the workflow I would go through to kind of figure it out I would open it up and the first thing I do is go to image size now as I mentioned this is a personal preference but even if you're not currently a big keyboard shortcut kind of person I find I spent an awful lot of time going into image size so it was one of those keyboard shortcuts I learned relatively quickly because instead of always going image image size command option iron control old I just became I don't know one of those shortcuts that I learned fairly quickly okay so back to our story here I open this file and is telling me all the information it's image sizes seven point three three megabytes this is thie dimensions and this is where it's currently set just because previously I had re sample turned off so this tells me I have seven point three three megabytes worth of information or on my inn chet I could print at about a five by eight at two forty so here's the other way to look at it what if you say but gosh I really need this to be an eight by ten so I type in eight and then says well I can do an eight by twelve if I re sample it up but that means it's doing the math and again see see you can see the qualities not the greatest so that's telling it I need you to invent information so the other option would be to say okay well let's see what happens if this so that's what I just had a had a free sample turned on and I made this eight and it made this image size bigger let's say what if I don't want you to re sample I want to see the best I can get to so if I put a width of eight it says well if you want to print an eight by twelve because that's the dimensions this photo the best I can do is one sixty point one two five is that enough well guess what the answer is it depends it depends on the image it depends on your printer while two forty would be my preferred resolution one sixty is not horrible it might not be quite as good but just to put this in some perspective it's all a matter of degree years ago I did a little experiment and I took a photograph and I made I want to say five different prints three hundred to fifty two hundred one fifty one hundred I think was the lowest and I thought I expected one hundred to be horrible because that was effectively screen resolution but the funny thing was when I printed them out and I act sexually right on the back of them which one was which and laid them out it was a subtle difference now certainly between one hundred and three hundred there was a bit of a difference but honestly after one fifty it was pretty different pretty hard to tell the difference it was pretty subtle and certainly like some of my friends who were in the printing business they were getting out of lupin like well that's cheating because you wouldn't look at a print on a wall while maybe you would but I wouldn't look at it with a little loop and go out and see the difference so when we held them up as if they were in a frame no one could really tell the difference so what I guess what I'm saying is that some of these numbers like when I say established a good number for your a chip that means in an ideal world you would have this number but personally my preference would be given the choice between re sampling it up to make it to forty and therefore artificially inventing new pixels or doing it this way that I just showed you and saying don't re sample it just alter the numbers and as long as I end up with something that's one hundred fifty or higher I'd rather try that now the purest might say no no you definitely need to forty well that's what sometimes we don't have it and remember all of this discussion is based on what we're starting with in this particular example I'm pretending because I really do have the original raw file that this is all I got so that's all you have to work with you have to figure out what's the best you can do and my personal preference would be again I'd rather print this one at one sixty then push it up to two forty and risk artificially changing the pixels now as we saw here in this example photo shop see see this is one of its nicer new features is the fact that I can make this image size command much bigger and now if I do want to compare let's go back and reset this what if I said you know what let's actually push this up we sample it so I'm gonna put this eight now it's not horrible but I don't know I'm just not convinced I think I would probably in this case say you know what let's just tell it that we don't want to re sample and of course I was doing it the wrong way it should have been ten this way so now okay now I let me retract my statement little bit one twenty eight maybe not quite as good so what I might do in this case and I apologize that I didn't do this right the first time actually I'm I'm sorry I am right oh boy that was that was a really good demonstration because I realized I was not seeing the entire image if I zoomed out I would remind me that actually is a tall images when I zoomed in like this I was thinking was white for a second but let's continue with this scenario since I went down this path if I did this and went gosh is on ly one twenty eight then what I might do is this I would say okay well let's pretend I actually wanted to tend my fifteen and the math said one twenty eight I would click okay then I would go back to image size and re sample it but I'd only re sample it up a little bit like one fifty so now I'm going from seven megabytes to ten which is not asking photoshopped would event a huge amount of pixel information so there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing image size in a couple of steps first turn reese ample off and massage the numbers the sash massage the numbers pathology do whatever you need to to make the numbers close to what you want and then go back turn reese ample on but we're pushing it up just a little notch not a huge amount so again just distressed the point um you want to artificially resize as minimally as possible and to stress the other couple of main points in this lesson if you do start with a really large file don't let photoshopped fool you into zooming in two hundred percent of all this tiny detail work member a little technique of doing that two window kind of things I think that will serve you a lot now interestingly what I found is at first I was always doing that duel window thing so I wouldn't forget and now over time I just in my head remind myself I don't need to worry about every little tiny detail is gonna end up being smaller but initially at least doing that do a window thing is a whole lot easier so here's what I suggest you want to do to kind of experiment with your assignment if you will is too if you have a camera file open it in its largest possible size then find some other file you have that's quite small in terms of image size and open that as well and then just spend a few minutes just experimenting with what happens if I turn re sample on or off if you see that file size getting bigger that means photo shop is inventing information and for the most part you'll probably see ah loss in quality and the more you do that then we'll start how putting in perspective so you know and this is why I always make this point better to be too big than too small so if you have a large file I'd rather have a file that's large that I can scale down than the other way around so just spent a bit of time playing wealth image size and we'll see you tomorrow