I don’t own the latest version of Paint Shop Pro (now owned by Corel), but the basic resizing adjustments should be the same (from what I can tell on their website). After you have finished work on your image, make sure you save (of course you are working on a duplicate file so the original is safe and untouched), then on the menu bar, go to “Image”> “Resize…”.

    Note that on top of the dialog box is the original’s dimensions (don’t worry about the pixels per inch stuff, that’s only for prints, not what we’re doing – resizing for electronic use). In the “Pixel Dimension” section, if you haven’t done so already, change the measurement to pixels. Then type in “768” in either the width or height box (depending on which ever is the longest dimension). The other dimension should automatically change to keep the ratio correct. Note: this dialog remembers the last setting you had, so make sure that if you are going from horizontals to verticals that you change the long dimension numbers accordingly.

    Skip the “Print Size” section and go down and make sure “Resample using:” is checked. In the drop-down menu button, change it to “Bicubic”. Confirm that “Maintain original print size” is checked (this will “gray out” boxes that we don’t need to worry about here). Note: while the pixel dimensions are remembered, this box does not always stay checked. Click “OK”.

    Now that we are resized, it just a matter of saving. On the menu bar, go to: “File”> “Save As…” or “Save as copy” (don’t’ use “Save” as that will overwrite the file you’re working on). Don’t worry about where you are saving the image to, we’ll do that later, but do change the “Save as type:” to “JPEG-JIFF Compliant (*.jpg, *.jiff, *.jpeg)”. Then click “Options…”.

    Another window (“Save Options”) pop-up. We could choose our compression quality here, but there is no indication on what the file size will be. So, click on the “Run Optimizer…” button in the lower left. This opens yet another window (and closes the previous two) with two preview image windows on top and a three tab menu on the bottom. Choose the “Quality” tab.

    In the “Set compression value to:” box (small number, higher quality, larger file size, less compression), change the number until the “Compressed” value shown under the preview windows shows something close to 350, 000 bytes (but not over). Leave the “Chroma subsampling:” in it’s default setting. Click OK.

    In the “Save Copy As” pop-up dialog window, now browse/navigate to where you want save your image to and rename the file (using the particular file naming convention called for by the competition rules you are entering) – and confirm that it will be a jpeg file type. If your image consists of layers, don’t worry as when we now save, it will be flattened. Click “Save”.

    It doesn’t look like anything happened as we are back to our original (although pixel reduced) file. You can go ahead and close it (but I would double check that your copy got saved to where it was supposed to go by browsing/navigating to it to verify), but when it asks you if you want to save the file, say NO. This will keep your working file intact because we saved it before we pixel reduced it (you did save before resizing it, didn’t you?).

Copyright © 2011 Oregon Coast Photographers' Association, Inc. All rights reserved.
Version: 1.0
Revised: March 25, 2011