I have many images of various sizes, but occasionally I need a new size. I’d like to do this myself.
In theory, I could open Microsoft Paint and reduce an image by a percentage and resave it. Naturally, I’d choose an existing image of a higher size with a similar ratio of length and width. By checking attributes, I could make it the needed size.
Is this the correct way to do it?
If needed, I could get another program. I’m worried that Paint might be doing something I don’t understand and may be affecting the quality of the picture in some way.
I use GIMP. It’s not quite Photoshop, but it’s free and it can handle any image manipulation I need to do.
I open the image in GIMP, click Image → Scale Image, and type in the size I want. Then I go to File → Export As. Always use a different file name so you don’t overwrite the original.
In theory as long as you’re shrinking (not enlarging) the image and you tick maintain aspect ratio, the quality shouldn’t suffer, but I’d still recommend avoiding Paint.
You can try GIMP, or I tend to err towards Paint.NET, as I find GIMP’s UI can get a bit frustrating confusing.
There’s also plenty of online web apps that will do this sort of thing for you.
If you get photoshop all you need to do is shift+click and hold and drag the image to the size you want. It keeps the proportions the same, so no distortion or anything like that.
