Dis Dat Designs
debbieT's Paint Shop Pro Tutorials
PSP 7 Cropping, Resizing, and Exporting Digital Images
For PSP Beginners

If you would like to offer any of my tutorials to your groups or classes, please contact me first. Please list the name of your group or class, and your website if you have one. Thanks so much!

If you like my Paint Shop Pro tutorials, be sure to take a peek at my new tutorials at Debbie T Designs. Learn how to build your own web site with free tutorials for xhtml and css!

For this tutorial, you will need a digital photo - you can use one that you scanned or one from a digital camera. Use any photo on your hard drive.

1. First things first, File>SAVE AS then choose .psp as the file type. A good option is to keep all your photos in a separate folder on your hard drive to keep them organized.

2. When digital images are scanned or are imported from a digital camera, they are usually much too large (in physical size and in file size) for viewing on the Web.

Here is a smaller sized example of the image I am going to use for this tutorial. First let's crop the image to delete any excess space around the subject. Click the CROP Tool and drag a cropped selection around the area in your photo you want to keep. The edges of the bounding box can be easily edited by dragging the edges outward or inward.

Once you are satisfied with the crop selection - click "Crop Image" on the Tool Options Palette. Viola! Your image is cropped.

3. Now let's resize. Click Image>RESIZE and the dialog box will appear. I like resizing by Percentage settings. Once the % is adjusted, you will see the pixel size change automatically too (even though it will be grayed out.) Take a look at the bottom right corner of the workspace. You should see the current dimensions of your image. When you click OK, the image will be resized. Check the bottom corner for the new dimensions.

NOTE: Does your image look a bit smaller than you thought it should? It could be because you might be seeing a zoomed out view of the image. Click View>NORMAL VIEWING 1:1 to see the exact view of your image.

If you find that the image is still too large, don't resize a second time. Click Edit>UNDO and then try the resize again, using a smaller % setting. Resizing an image too many times will also diminish details of the image.

4. Lastly, let's export the image as a .jpg file. Click File>Export>JPG OPTIMIZER.

• The Quality Tab: choose the compression settings. The larger the compression the smaller the file size. But also remember that larger compressions also decrease the quality of your final .jpg image file. The trick is to find a happy medium, with good file size and good quality.
• Start the Compression Value at 20 then move the lever to more or less compression. The preview window will show how your compressed image compares to the original. The compressed file size is listed under the right preview pane.
• The Format Tab: choose either Standard or Progressive. Choose whichever will produce the smallest file size.
• The Download Tab: View how long your file takes to download on various modem speeds. Remember, there are still lots of Internet Users on Dial-up connections. If you are emailing your photo file, try to stay under 75KB if possible. If you are adding your photo to a webpage, the total images on your page should total no more than 40 or 50KB. If you are adding lots of images to one webpage, try using resized thumbnails with links to larger images. Then your visitors can pick which image(s) they want a closer view of.

And that is it. Click to see my final image.

Learn (x)HTML & CSS ~ Paint Shop Pro Tutorials ~ Contact debbieT ~ Beginners ~ Free Backgrounds ~ Home

Website Design & Graphics created by debbieT and DisDat Designs
© 2000-2006 - all rights reserved.