Setting image size for online sharing

Some of the online sharing services and e-mail techniques that we looked at earlier in the course automatically set the size of your image for their intended destination online. But there may be times when you want to send an e-mail attachment, or prepare an image for online sharing outside of Elements, so let me show you how you can change the size of an image for that kind of online sharing. As in the last movie, I'm going to do my resizing in the image size dialog box from here in the Expert edit workspace in the Editor, but the steps are slightly different than for changing the size of an image for print. When I want to change the size of a photo for online sharing, I'll open the image size dialog by going to the Image menu, choosing Resize, and Image Size.

And here in the Image Size dialog box, I'll concentrate on the Pixel Dimension area. I'm not really interested in the Document Size area, because that only controls the size of an image if and when that image is printed. The first thing I'm going to do here is come down to be Resample Image field, and make sure that it's checked, because what I want to do is to change the actual number of pixels in this file. It's not a good idea to upsize the number of pixels in a file, in other words, to make an image bigger, but you can always make it smaller. So, with Resample Image checked, I'll come up to the Width field in the Pixel Dimensions area of the Image Size dialog box, and I'll change the Width from its original 1800 pixels to a smaller number. Let's say that I need this file to be only 300 pixels wide, so I'll type 300, and that changes the Height proportionately, because by default, Constrain Proportions is checked down here.

So I've made this image smaller in terms of pixel dimensions, so that it will fit in a particular spot on a photo sharing site, a social media site, or as a small e-mail attachment. The only other thing to do here is to choose the formula that Elements will use to throw away the extra pixels. I'll come down to the menu at the bottom of the Image Size dialog box, and as I explained in the last movie, the best choice for reducing file size here is Bicubic Sharper, so I'll select that, and then I'll click OK.

Because I'm viewing my file here in the Expert edit workspace at the same zoom level that I was viewing the original file, it looks a lot smaller, but if I make it 100% by double-clicking the Zoom tool, that changes the size as it appears here on my screen. To check the actual size of this file, I'll come down to the information area at the bottom of the document window, I'll click and hold, and here I can see that this file is now reduced to only 300 pixels by 200 pixels. The Resolution here really doesn't matter, because Resolution in this box, and in the Image Size dialog box refers only to the number of pixels that will be assigned to every inch if and when the file is printed.

So that's how you can prepare an image for posting online, or sending by e-mail outside of Elements, changing its image size here in the Editor.