Artist to Artist: Tools for Resizing Your Photos

If you've been making art and entering shows for awhile you remember having to send slides of your work with your entries What a hassle and expense that was! Now we just email a digital image. So much easier—if you know how! You can't just send any old photo. There is always a very specific size and format requirement. 

Over the past few years as registrar for the Open Studios I have seen that preparing those photos, and especially resizing them, seems to be a stumbling block for a number of our artists. Last year I pointed you to a couple tutorials on our Facebook page. This year I thought you might want to know about a couple of free tools that can help.

Adobe Photoshop is, of course, the standard. But Photoshop is not cheap and may be more than you will ever need. There is a nice little free program called Gimp, which runs on both Mac and Windows computers.

Gimp has many of the same features as Photoshop and will allow you to adjust your photo in a number of ways and resize it to your specifications. There are online tutorials that will take you through it.

If you are using an iPhone or iPad, here is a very nifty little app that is as simple as can be. It is called "Image Resizer +". Just search for it on your online App Store. It's just 99 cents, and has none of the editing features of Gimp or Photoshop. It just resizes photos, which may be all you need. It is available for iPad and iPhone. (There is an Android app called "photo resizer" that is probably similar, but I don't have experience with it.)

Here's how it works. First, be sure your photo is cropped to exclude any unwanted background, and saved in an album on your phone or tablet. Open the Resizer app and click on "photo" and find your photo in its album.

Your photo will come up with the information about its size in the box on the right.

This shows that my photo is currently 1481 pixels wide by 1695 pixels high. I need it to be 1200 pixels on its longest side, so I move to the next section down and choose that I will resize it by entering pixels, rather than a percentage. Then below that I will select the height (because that is my longest side) and type in 1200, then click "next," which will decrease the pixels in width proportionally and then "done".

Now I can see that my image size is 1049 pixels by 1200 pixels. Perfect!

The last step is to click "share" and save it to your album. You will now have two versions of the same photo in your album, so remember that the last one added is the resized photo.

Some things to remember:

• Your photos need to be clear, straight, and the color correct.
• If your work is irregular in shape, be sure to photograph it on a white background, lighted to eliminate shadows. Framed work should be cropped to the edges of the frame.
• You need to start with a high resolution photo—that means shoot at as many pixels as you can set your camera for. Then resize to a smaller size. If you try to resize to a larger size the quality of your photo will be fuzzy and terrible. In other words, if you are resizing to 1200 pixels your original photo must be more than 1200 pixels on the longest side to begin with.
• Remember that the photos you provide for the tour registration will be used online, in advertising and printed in the catalog. They represent you to the public, so be sure they do you credit! If you enter a lot of shows and/or don't want to spend your time fussing with photos consider having a professional take your photos.
• Remember to rename your photo, using the naming system or label the registration asks for before you send it.

I hope these digital tools are helpful. I have been using the resizer on my iPad a lot lately, and find it really handy.

Happy resizing!
Terry

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