Relative Size

Relative size: Be careful of the appearance of size - it is relative! First of all, most software allows you to zoom - make sure you're viewing your picture full-size (1:1) before you decide to change it. Above, Paint Shop Pro is displaying at 1/2 size (1:2), which means the picture would actually be twice as large if displayed on a web page. 

Somewhere in your software's display (at the lower right hand corner in Paint Shop Pro) is the exact dimensions of your picture in pixels. A pixel is one "piece" of color - greatly enlarged, it will be a square of one solid color. The physical size of your picture when printed is a combination of pixels vs. resolution (measured in pixels per inch) - a picture  576 pixels wide at 72 pixels per inch will be 8  inches wide. However, the same picture can be printed at 4 inches wide, and the resolution is now 144 pixels per inch - an apparently sharper, higher-quality image. Likewise, the same picture could be printed poster-size at 32 inches wide - but the resolution would be 18 pixels per inch.

What does this mean? It means, enlarging and shrinking your picture doesn't increase the number of pixels, it only makes them more or less large, and hence more or less visible to the naked eye. A "pixilated" image - one at low resolution (see at right) will look fuzzy and splotchy, as the pixels get larger.

This is the most visible with print. On your computer screen, enlarging and shrinking is less problematic, since the your computer display has fewer available resolution settings, and pictures are usually being shrunk rather than enlarged. Since pixels is the unit of measure of screen display on a computer, the size of a picture on a computer (without intervention from you or software) is dictated by pixel dimensions only. But be mindful - if someone else has the same screen size as you do, but has the pixel resolution set to 1280X1024, the same picture will look a lot smaller on her machine!

Sizing in Your Software: Since Word, Publisher, PowerPoint, all give you control over image size, it is not necessary to use your graphics program's resizing options with your picture. The Web is another story - there, since your picture must be squeezed through a relatively small wire, it's important for its file size to be as small as possible. FrontPage will "Resample" pictures for you, which works well, but resizing in your graphics program gives you more control. Remember to save in a reduced size only as the last step, since reducing size actually changes the resolution (reducing the number of pixels), so your picture's quality will be reduced. Controlling color count also helps.