Walsall Wood Camera Club, Resizing

Projected Digital Image Competitions

The Club's digital projector has a native resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels and it will be necessary to resize all digital images that are entered into any of the Club's projected digital image competitions, so that such images shall fall within those pixel dimensions. The images do not have to be resized exactly to those dimensions, but to make use of the maximum amount of screen area and to obtain the best possible impact when the image is projected onto the screen, the image should be resized as near as possible to the 1024 x 768 pixel dimensions.

An image size of 1024 x 768 pixels is required for all projected digital image competitions held by Walsall Wood Camera Club at the present time. The same requirement as to image size may not apply to any competitions held elsewhere and therefore, the rules of any specific competition should always be checked before any images are resized. For instance, an image size of 1400 x 1050 pixels seems to be increasingly used by many Clubs.

Please note that the resizing instructions that follow relate only to digital images that are being reduced in size to meet the requirements of projected digital image competitions. These instructions do not relate to changing the size of a digital image for printing as different criteria apply for that purpose.

The resizing instructions that follow have been based on the procedures used in Photoshop. However the procedures used by Photoshop Elements and other image editing programmes will be very similar to those described here. If you do not have any image editing software on your computer then you may wish to try Gimp or PhotoFiltre both of which can be downloaded from the internet free of charge.

How to resize an Image for the above competitions.

1. Open the full size image into Photoshop.

Please be aware that when the original image has been resized, the new image will almost certainly be a smaller image than the original and that some of the pixels in the original image will have been discarded. Once this new image has been saved, those discarded pixels cannot be reclaimed and it is therefore recommended that a duplicate image is resized and not the original image. To duplicate the original image go to Image > Duplicate.

2. Open the Image Size Dialog Box by going to Image > Image Size.

3. At the bottom of the Image Size Dialog Box make sure that "Constrain Proportions" and "Resample Image" are both ticked. In the drop down resample menu choose "Bicubic".

4. The "Pixel Dimensions" section at the top of the Image Size Dimensions Box shows the pixel dimensions of the original image opened for resizing. These pixel dimensions now need to be changed so that they show the pixel dimensions required for the resized image.

If an image is to be shown in a landscape format then ideally the width should be set at 1024 pixels. Photoshop will then automatically figure the dimension for the height. However make sure that the height measurement does not exceed 768 pixels. If it does simply reset the height to 768 pixels leaving Photoshop to automatically figure the dimension for the width.

If an image is to be shown in a portrait format then ideally the height should be set at 768 pixels. Photoshop will then automatically figure the dimension for the width. However make sure that the width measurement does not exceed 1024 pixels. If it does simply reset the width to 1024 pixels leaving Photoshop to automatically figure the dimension for the height.

If the original image is a square format, set the height to 768 pixels leaving Photoshop to automatically figure the dimension for the width which should of course also be 768 pixels.

5. The "Document Size" section in the Image Size Dialog Box is used for resizing an image for printing purposes only and can therefore be disregarded for the purpose of these instructions.

The pixels per inch (ppi) resolution can also be disregarded as it has no relevance to an image which is being resized for viewing on a computer monitor or shown as a projected digital image. Such image is measured in pixels dimensions only and the ppi resolution of that image makes no difference to the way that the image will look when it is viewed on a computer monitor or projected on a screen.

6. If the changed pixel dimensions as outlined in paragraph 4 above are agreed, then click OK in the Image Size Dialog Box and the image will be resized accordingly.

7. It may well be that the resized image may now need sharpening and if this is the case, this should be done at this stage.

8. All that now remains to be done is to save the resized image by going to File > Save As. In the Save As Dialog Box now shown choose JPEG from the format list, choose a new filename and specify a "Save in" location. In the JPEG Options Dialog Box that follows, save the resized image as a JPEG at maximum quality with a value of 10, 11 or 12 depending on the file size required.