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Digital Focus: Clean Up Your Portraits

Dave Johnson

Q&A: Should I Resize by Simple Amounts?

I read your article on resizing digital pictures, and I have a question. I often have to resize various pictures. I've wondered if resizing by simple amounts results in better looking pictures. If you shrink something by exactly 50 percent, would the result be less jaggy than resizing by 50.0236831 percent?

--Dan Frankowski, Saint Paul, Minnesota

It seems logical that resizing an image by a "simple" amount would produce better results than resizing by odd-ball values. The reality, though, is that it has no real effect on the final image. That's because image editors use some pretty sophisticated techniques to resize images. Typically, for instance, an image editor uses interpolation to smooth out transitions between pixels. The result is that you'll get pretty much the same results no matter what values you use to make an image smaller. Bottom line: It won't matter if you resize by 49, 50, or 51 percent--you won't be able to see a difference in image quality.

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