Friday, April 19, 2024

IMAGE PREP

Changing Pixel Dimensions of Show Entries

Before you do anything , save a copy of your image with a different name. That way, if anything goes wrong, you’ll still have the original copy as backup. The pixel size doesn’t really have anything to do with the print size of your images. In photographs, images are made up of tiny dots of color. The more dots there are per inch, the higher resolution your photo will be. Those dots are called pixels. For printing, that’s a good thing, but for emailing or posting on the web it makes the file too large. You can change the pixel size in most photo editing programs, but the process might be slightly different in each one.

In Photoshop Elements 2018, at the top, left side of the screen, there’s a row of tabs. The tabs are file, edit, image, enhance, layer, select, filter, view, window and help. If you click on the image tab, you’ll get a drop-down menu where you can choose “resize”. If you click on that, you can choose “image size”. That opens a window where you can change the pixel dimensions. Before you do that, make sure the boxes at the bottom of that screen are checked to scale styles, constrain proportions and resample image. That will keep your image from getting out of proportion. Then, you can just change the largest pixel dimension to the maximum allowed size and it will automatically change the other dimension to what it needs to be. For example if your painting was 2800 pixels wide and 2240 pixels high, and the maximum allowed for either dimension is 2000, you would change the 2800 width to 2000. Photoshop would automatically change the height to 1600. Doing that will change the inches on that page as well, but you don’t need to worry about that. You would still be able to print it at the original size if you ever wanted to. Then, just click OK and save your photo with the name specified in the prospectus.

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” – Edward Hopper