08-23-2009, 05:19 PM

Using Photoshop, I'm trying to resize my large photos to the standard 4x6 inches for printing and then framing. However, once I get it down to 4x6 INCHES, the PIXELS become 432x288 and the filesize dramatically decreases (from megabytes to kilobytes). Then, when viewed at actual size, they're very small. Why is this? How do I get them to be actually 4x6 inches to be printed? Thanks.

08-23-2009, 06:06 PM

Originally Posted by rsherid

Using Photoshop, I'm trying to resize my large photos to the standard 4x6 inches for printing and then framing. However, once I get it down to 4x6 INCHES, the PIXELS become 432x288 and the filesize dramatically decreases (from megabytes to kilobytes). Then, when viewed at actual size, they're very small. Why is this? How do I get them to be actually 4x6 inches to be printed? Thanks.

How exactly are you resizing these images?

08-23-2009, 08:22 PM

make sure the 'resample' box is clicked

08-23-2009, 08:58 PM

There's two ways to resize images. One is by just taking an image at certain resolution and transferring it to another canvas with higher resolution. For example, an image that's like 1000 pixels wide but at 72 dpi (dots per inch) resolution would fill up a print of 14 inches wide, but would be blurry because you're allocating less pixels per inch with the lower 72 dpi. Take the same image and transfer it to a canvas that's set to 300 dpi resolution, and your print will only be 3 inches wide, but you'll see just as much because you have the same amount of pixels that are smaller and more crammed together, in turn making your image sharper and more appealing.

The other way just involves resizing an image's dimensions while still retaining same resolution.

In short the former keeps original amount of image data while latter decreases a lot of image data.

What you're doing sounds like latter method. You're taking an image with low resolution and resizing it to fit into a 6x4 dimension but using the same dpi.

Let's take one of the photos my point and shoot does as an example to resize and print out. My point and shoot takes an image the size of 3352x2368 pixels @ 180 dpi. If I wanted to make it fit in to a 6x4 print I'd place the same image onto a new canvas of roughly around 500-600 dpi so I can get extremely crisp detail in my print.