Resizing

Your camera probably captures far more pixels than you need for typical output. Unless you have a very old camera, or have configured your camera to shoot at a low pixel count, if you’re exporting for the Web or email, or printing out a 4” × 6” print, you’ll need to reduce the pixel count of your image. If your camera yields images with a very high pixel count—8 megapixels or higher—you might even need to resize when printing out to 8” × 10.” Similarly, if you’re delivering images to a client for use in a publication, they may have specific size and resolution requirements.

If you’re printing at very, very large sizes, you might need to enlarge your image. In either case, understanding the nature of image sizing is an important first step in your output workflow.