Resizing images almost always causes pixelation (when you see coarse-looking jagged edges in your picture), whether you make the image smaller or enlarge it.  JPEG images are especially unfriendly towards the idea of resizing.  There are few things that graphic designers hate as much as pixelated images! So how do we make it bearable?


There are different ways to resize your image in Photoshop.



  • Dragging : You can select the free transform tool and simply drag the corners until the image is the right size. This isn’t the greatest idea, though.  Even if you make it smaller, you’ll probably still notice that the image seems more blurred and fuzzy. Dragging it much larger causes serious pixelation - dragging it into a new file with a higher resolution might help a little.

  • Changing Image Size :  You can alter the image size (Image > Image Size), just as long as you remember to constrain proportions (else your image may appear all weird and stretched out). A good tip is to use the Bicubic resampling style for enlarging, and the Bilinear style for reducing the image’s dimensions.  After you have resized the image, it might need a bit of sharpening. 
    Use the Filter > Sharpen or Unsharp Mask tool.

If you think about it, resizing images basically comes down to spreading pixel information over a greater (or lesser) number of pixels.  It doesn’t give more detail to the image!  So my best advice for resampling images would be to re-scan the picture at the desired resolution.