Re-Sizing and Saving Your Photos and Files

Today's post is about pixels and printing and photos. Here is a good practice to make sure you never lose a great photo because you re-sized it too small.

How to Save Your Photos When Editing:

1. Open the photo you want to edit.

2. IMMEDIATELY do a SAVE AS. This makes sure you are now editing a new version of the photo and any changes you make will not effect the original. You always want to keep the original as it was. Go to the 'File' menu and select 'Save As' .

3. Choose a name that briefly describes your photo and select where to save it on your computer.

4. Now your original is safe in case there is an "Oh no!" during editing. (Of course you should also back up your photos from time to time!)

Good Info/Rules About Sizing:

1. If you are using your photo on the web or via email the file can be much smaller than if you want to print it. Smaller means less pixels. When I email photos I keep them around 400px (pixels) X 700px, at 72dpi (dots per inch)–100dpi: this gives the viewer a nice size to look at on their computer, it will send quickly, and it won't be high resolution for printing (if you don't want it copied). The file size shouldn't be too big (200KB a little more a little less).

2. If you are going to print the photo then you want a resolution of 300dpi (a lot more pixels!). This is important. Web sized photos are 72dpi, they don't print clear or large. They look nice on the screen but don't be fooled they won't print nice.

3. This is important!!! Once you take out pixels, they can't be replaced! Let me repeat, once you take the pixels out (make the picture smaller in size, like for the web) you can not get those pixels back or put them back into the picture. That is why you ALWAYS do a 'Save As'.

Is this helpful? Let me know, it's the first post like this, of many more to come. Coming up. . . Re-sizing Options. 
Send questions my way too, I'm happy to help!
~Colette

p.s.
Funny (not so funny) story. . . my first digital camera was a whopping 1.3 megapixels! I spent over $400 on it back in 2000-ish. And, of course, I knew nothing of resolution at the time, being a new graphic design student. So at least a couple years worth of photos are only viewable on a computer screen. If I print them they are approximately 1.5 inches in size. Luckily for me, I had a film SLR camera, so not all memories were lost.