Resizing images in Photoshop

July 6, 2008 · Print This Article

This Opening & Saving images in Photoshop tutorial will explain how to simply open & save images in Photoshop.

In this tutorial I hope to explain clearly how to open and save in photoshop. It’s simple but when you’re new to Photoshop it can be slightly confusing.

If my steps are not clear enough, please do leave a comment below and I’ll try to help out more.

Feel free to request something similar this Opening & Resizing images in Photoshop tutorial.

Resizing images in Photoshop - The Steps

Firstly open Photoshop, then go into -> File -> Open, then locate the file you want to resize, left click on it, then click Open.

Now before I teach you now to resize images, you need to know that it’s not possible to make images bigger, without making the quality of them extremely low and making them look tacky. Resizing is basically making them smaller if they’re too big.

Now that that’s settled and you’ve got the image open that you want to resize, go into -> Image -> Image Size… A resizing window will come up, it’ll look like this, but without the red & blue lines. You’ll see that there’s three bits that have red or blue square lines around them. The first box, highlighted in red, is the main bit. Make sure that your drop down menu’s in the first box is set to pixels. You’ll notice that all the numbers in the picture that I showed you are different to the numbers in yours, that’s just because they image that you’re resizing is a different size. the next thing you need to change is the pixel dimensions of your image, if for example the image you’re resizing is 1000×800, you need to resize it to something smaller. Like I said above, you can’t make images bigger, only smaller. So what I suggest doing is changing the width in the red box to 500, the height will change automatically.

Next, you’ll see there’s a box highlighted in blue, this means it doesn’t need to be touched. Leave the settings as they are, it doesn’t matter that they’re not the same as mine were in the picture I showed you.

Moving onto the green box, this one is very simple. Just change your settings so they look exactly like mine did in that screen shot. After that’s done, click OK.

Sometimes, when you resize your image, Photoshop automatically zooms the image out, so it looks smaller than it actually is. To find out if this is the case, you need to find your Navigator box, click HERE to see what it looks like. If you can’t find it on the right side with all your other editing boxes, go into -> Window -> Navigator, it should have now come up on the right side, if not, go back into Window, then find Navigator, but don’t click it just yet. Beside it, check to see if there’s a tick, if not, click it. That should solve your problem.

Now that you can see the Navigator box, check to see if the little white box says 100%… if not, change it to 100%.

OK, so technically we’re done resizing your image, but if you’re not happy with the size and want to make it a little less smaller than it is now but still smaller than it was before, so something in between, or even if you want it smaller than it is now, then hit CTRL/Command + ALT + Z, you may need to do it a few times until your image goes back to the original size. Now just repeat the steps that I’ve taught you above, but change the size that you resize it to, if after that you’re still not happy with it, repeat it again and maybe again until you’re happy with it.