Resizing
It’s always good to put your best foot forward when showing your art on the Web – you’ll usually start your picture larger, then shrink it down for screen display. But you run the risk of either having a blurry picture, losing all the details, or getting ugly sharpening artifacts. Or, horrifyingly, both!
I’ve picked up a few ideas about this over the years, so I’ll pass them along. First, when shrinking your picture, its good to keep in mind that PhotoShop works best in 50% increments. It just does a fine job at 50%, less good at any other amount. Another tip is that if you sharpen BEFORE you shrink, the final outcome will usually look more natural than sharpening afterwards.
So here is the process I use to shrink a picture to make a JPEG:
1. Sharpen the picture slightly by using Filters>Unsharp Mask, at about 35 – 45 % (no more). Radius and Threshold depend on how big the picture is (pixel size) so play with them – they should both be pretty low.
2. Shrink by 50%. (Image>Image Size)
3. Repeat the first two steps as needed until you are almost at your target size.
- For instance, if you start at 2200 px wide, and want to get to 500 px, you’d do this twice. First shrink to 1100 px, then to 550 px.
4. Sharpen again, usually a bit less.
5. Finally, resize one last time to your target size. In this case, I went from 550 px to 500 px.
6. If you think it still needs some sharpening at the final size, try sharpening ONLY the areas that are the most important, just a bit. Particularly, try adding a touch of sharpness to just the EYES of the main characters. This is usually enough.
I just find that this process makes for the best looking smaller images. Try it and see what you think.
Reader Input
Last time, I invited readers to send in some ideas, and while I didn’t exactly receive a flood of input, it was great to hear from some of you!
Linda Tso sent in a delightful list of ideas. Here are a few of them:
Background color of open image windows:
With a document open, using the Bucket Tool, shift-clicking on any point outside your image canvas, in the image window, will change the default gray to the Foreground color. Great if you prefer white or black, or any other color.
Selections:
When using the Marquee tool, holding down the spacebar and dragging allows you to move the selection around as is instead of changing its size. I think it’s particularly useful with the elliptical marquee tool. Hit “Enter” then type in a number to change the amount of feather on the Options bar.
If you’ve ever drawn a character where the nose is at an odd angle, or maybe one eye is larger than the other, or *something* that just doesn’t sit right, make a feathered lasso around the offending parts then hit Cmd-J (Mac) Ctrl-J (PC). This duplicates the selection on a layer above (Layer>New>Layer via Copy), which you can move/transform until it looks right. A great advantage with digital art! ;)
