
When you open your image, click on Tools and then Adjust Size. You can use the built-in Preview program. If you want to scale an image in OS X, you don’t have to install any additional software. That’s about it for scaling images in Windows.

Sinc (Lanczos3) – This method uses a mathematical formula called Sinc and does a high quality interpolation. Pretty much the same, but again, the scaled down image is smoother and this option will give the best result. This makes the picture look smoother than the previous option.Ĭubic – The color of a pixel is determined by the average color of the eight closest pixels in the picture. Linear – The color of a pixel is determined by the average color of the four closest pixels in the picture. It’s the fastest method, but can result in a coarse image. None – The color of a pixel is determined by its closest neighbor in the picture. Here is the difference between the different options: Lastly, you can choose the Interpolation method, which determines the quality of the scaling. When scaling, the whole image is always maintained. If you don’t want it to stretch, then you have to crop the image, which is kind of like scaling, but not the same since you’re removing parts of the image. If you click on the little chain to the right, it will “unlink” and you can then change the width or the height independently, which will stretch your image. Even if you take a higher resolution like 1600×1200, you can still reduce the width of these really huge images under 1000 pixels and still it will take up the entire screen.Īlso note that when changing the width or height, the aspect ratio will be maintained by default. Note that the most common resolution for computer screens a couple of years ago was 1024×768. This means you can reduce the resolution to 72 or 100 ppi without any noticeable difference in the image on a computer screen and it will reduce your image size significantly. The spatial resolution most screens can show is 72 or 100 (PPI or pixels/in). You can also adjust the resolution, which will allow you to view the image in its original size online, but reduce the print quality.

This is the most common way to scale an image. You can change the image size directly by adjusting the width and the height. Anyway, once the scale image dialog appears, you’ll see a couple of options: You can do that by going to Windows and clicking on Single Window Mode. Note that in Gimp 2.8, you can combine all the windows into a single window instead of everything floating around all over the place. Once you have it installed, open your image and then click on Image and Scale Image. It’s free and it has some nice tools for scaling images. If you want a little fancier program for resizing images, you can use a program called the Gimp.
