From quick traditional ways, to groundbreaking methods that will blow your mind, here are 5 of the best ways to resize your images.
1. Web-based Intelligent Resizing
The most common ways of image resizing - cropping and basic shrinking/enlarging usually ends up with compromised results - in the form of pictures which are either distorted or eliminate detail.
rsizr is a web-tool which scans the picture for ‘important’ sections and allows you to manipulate the size of the image by just resizing the picture’s ‘unimportant’ sections.
See the video below to get a better idea of this awesome technology. The results are simply amazing.
2. GIMP Plugin which is aware of your content
If you liked the rsizr technolgy described above and want a desktop version of it… Try out the Liquid Rescale plugin for GIMP (The open source version of Photoshop). This will allow you to take the editing offline and is perfect for heavier users.
3. Resize Multiple Images With a Right-Click
Microsoft calls them Power Toys - I call them features which should have been integrated into Windows XP by default.
Image Resizer is a free piece of software from Microsoft, which helps you resize one or more files from a right click menu directly in Windows Explorer. This Power Toy only works on XP, and not Vista.
4. The fastest way to create thumbnails
Quick Thumbnail is an online image resizer which bills itself as the fastest way to resize images online. What I really liked about this service was that you could:
- Either specify a picture or URL
- Resize it to common sizes based on different usage (icon, avatar, banner, full monitor resolution etc.)
- Simultaneously create multiple resized images on the spot (useful when testing various sizes).
5. Change normal images into vector format
One of the biggest advantages vector images have over other file types is the fact that they do NOT distort when resized. Here’s a good example of what happens when you zoom into a vector image.
Stanford University has recently released a free tool that will actually convert typical images into vector format! Works best with items without too many gradient colors like photos for example (Still looks great though - but the converted image doesn’t look ‘photo-like’).
Perfect for logos, scanned signatures, or anything which needs to be different sizes at different times.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:20 pm
GIMP it’s not an open-source Photoshop! it’s an alternative for this program and Adobe it doesn’t have anything to do with this community maintained program, called GIMP.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Nice list James. No.5 is the most awesome of all. Bitmap to vector is so cool.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:52 pm
A.Faith: You’re right of course. It’s more of an open source alternative to photoshop - but GIMPshop really looks a lot like the real thing :)
Syahid: Yeah it is…I really love #1 too.
February 7th, 2008 at 12:43 am
I’ve been using the free VSO Image Resizer and I’m quite happy with it.
But I’ll try some of the above as well. Thanx.
February 10th, 2008 at 6:47 am
When I’m on Linux I use GIMP, and on Windows I use Photoshop. But thanks to this list, I can have lighter alternatives.
March 9th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I don’t see reshade.com here? It’s free and online, better for photos than for illustrations though.
May 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 am
I got the best quality in resizing images using Reshade. First I have tried their online tool and was amazed by the clarity and quality of the pictures that I got. I finally bought the entire software and was impressed by the cheap price and by the quality of the results that I got.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Check out Picture Resizer, it it extremely easy to use (drag files on the tool to resize them; configure size by renaming the tool). And it can also do content-aware resizing -> http://www.rw-designer.com/retarget-image-carving