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How to resize pictures in Photoshop look easy but if you look closer, you will notice that changing the size of your pictures are actually causing deterioration to the quality of your images. One advantage of Illustration program like Illustrator over bitmap software like Photoshop is the former’s ability to resize pictures or images non-destructively. Vector files can be reduced and enlarged to any size imaginable and you will never lose their image quality. Unfortunately, in Photoshop as we all know, once you start playing around with an image in Photoshop, you lose some definition. For example, have you tried scaling down an image but afterwards decide to stretch the image back to its original size? You surely have experienced seeing those pixelated mess that occurs when you try to do that in Photoshop.

Thanks to the “Smart Objects” feature of Photoshop, which is available with CS2 and higher versions. Smart objects feature allows you to treat an image more like a vector object.Once your image is placed in the document you can resize picture as many times as you want as long as the new size is not larger than the original size of the image. The Smart Object feature actually embed the image in the layer so that any resizing that takes place calls on the original high resolution version.

Here, let’s have a step by step tutorial on how to use this feature of Photoshop:

Resize Pictures Step 1: Opening the image
Using Smart Object feature, you need to open your image in slightly different way. First you need to create a new document. With the document open, you have to go to File>Place.

Resize Pictures Step 2: Resizing
Navigate to your image and click Place.Your image will open with a bounding box around it. Use this to scale the image down. Hold down the Shift key and drag a corner point inwards. This gives you your Smart Object layer.

To make sure that you are doing it right, check the Layers palette and look for the icon. Your Smart Object should have a small page icon in the bottom right corner of the layer’s thumbnail.

Resize Pictures Step 3: Reverting to Original Size.

Making an image smaller is not usually a problem but scaling back the image to its orginal size after scaling it is the real problem. Using the Smart Object feature, this is no longer a concern. Just click on the Smart Object to show the bounding box and by holding down Shift key, drag one of the corner points outwards. Your image will be enlarged and still look crisp as long as you don’t go bigger than the original size of the image. Here, let’s compare an enlarged image using the traditional way via Scale Image option (left) with the enlarge image using Smart Objects option (right)

Resize Pictures Step 4: Swap Photos:
Once you have a Smart Object layer set up, you can replace the image for a new one and still keep the resizing qualities. (Crtl-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) on your Smart Object layer’s name and pick Replace Contents. navigate to the file you want to choose and click Place.

Below, as you can see, the new image will be a Smart Object.

Resize Pictures Step 5: Make a copy or copies of your layer by duplicating the Smart object layer.

Step 6: Quick Multiple edits
Using Smart Objects feature, you can also perform the same changes across several Smart Objects. To do this, Ctrl-Click (Mac) or right-click (PC) on your Smart Object layer and pick Edit Contents from the Menu.

Resize Pictures Step 6: Edit the Original

A new window with the original image will then open.Make some changes on your original Smart Object. You are free to do anything on your image. In this tutorial, we played around with the hue and saturation to change the color of the car.

Resize Pictures Step 7: Across the Board
Save the changes and then close the contents window. You will notice that the changes have been made to all of the Smart Objects because they are all copies of the original and linked to it. This is an excellent way of making simultaneous changes across many images.

P.S.

It is important to remember that smart objects are contained in separate layers to the original image. But if you open a smart object to make simultaneous changes, you need to flatten this image before closing and putting the edits in place.