Along with its many tools, Photoshop provides several ways to resize your images — whether you’re looking to increase or decrease the size, expand the borders, or just make sure your image fits its new ratio settings. Photoshop is considered royalty for image editing and manipulation. To benefit from other great Creative Cloud apps you might use, resizing images in Photoshop lets you utilize your images in other projects and for various purposes.

Use the Image Size tool to resize Photoshop images

This is the best option for retaining quality

Using Photoshop’s Image Size feature is the simplest option for resizing your images. It’s also the best for retaining quality. This technique should be used if you’re happy with the image's aspect ratio on the artboard, or it can be done after cropping to a ratio. From the top menu, navigate to Image, then Image Size to open the window.

Here, you’ll see the dimensions of your original image. You can change the scale to your preference, including pixels, centimeters, millimeters, percent, points, or picas. Photoshop’s default is pixels and the default resolution is PI — pixels per inch. The default ratio scaling is locked, which means if the width is changed, the height will follow the ratio. You can unlock the ratio, but be aware that this can cause warping, making any image look bad.

Under Fit To, there’s a drop-down menu of common ratios — or those saved in your Photoshop preferences. Using these ratios will not warp your image; instead, it will be fitted to the smallest matching scale to fit your selection.

To resize based on more specific sizes you might have, type one of your size specifications in the Height or Width box, and the other will snap to accommodate your image’s ratio.

While digital images don’t need a higher resolution than 72 PPI, if you’re printing your image, or want higher quality, type ‘300’ into the Resolution box before changing your resize dimensions. This ensures your newly sized image will be high quality, which you can view in the preview box before selecting OK.

When resizing images to large scales, a higher-spec computer system will give you the best results and stop Photoshop from freezing. Adobe products work great on the best Macs as well as Windows PCs.

Resize images in Photoshop with the Crop tool

Crop your image to the correct ratio

Resizing an image doesn’t always mean making it bigger or smaller in dimension, sometimes it means your image needs to fit a specific ratio — like 1:1 for Instagram, for example, or 2:1 for certain web images. Instead of squashing your image to fit those boundaries, unwanted edges can be cropped to create the correct size and ratio.

Select the Crop tool to reveal the crop marks. You can choose between cropping by eye and dragging the crop anchors inward on any side or selecting a ratio in the toolbar above the artboard.

When selecting a ratio, the crop marks snap to that ratio, but you can still move the crop selection to fit different areas of your image. The corners can also be dragged in or out if you want to crop tighter or looser with the same ratio parameters.

Cropping your image makes the photo itself smaller, but it doesn’t reduce the size overall. To reduce your image’s size, use the Image Size tool mentioned above to change dimensions and scale.

Resize your image with Crop and Generative Expand

Resize your image with new borders and background

Like Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool, which can be used to remove or replace elements of your images — such as a lone piece of trash on the ground or accidental photobombers in the background — you can also use Generative Expand to resize your image and improve composition. Both tools use Adobe Firefly’s technology to intelligently in-paint parts of your artboard based on the rest of your image.

Use Generative Expand to resize your image if you need to reshape the borders, such as adding more sky to the top of a photo or elongating your landscape image to fit a better ratio. Overall, you can use Generative Expand to improve compositions, fit ratios better, and resize your image.

1. Open your image and select the Crop (C) tool to reveal the crop marks and borders.
2. Drag the crop edges outside the current borders, using the gridlines to set your image’s composition. If you’ve set a ratio above, the crop marks will keep that ratio with your expansion.
3. In the Generative Expand tool below, fill in the prompt box or keep it empty, then select Generate. An empty prompt box will identify the bulk of your current image, especially the edges near the expanded borders, and it will generate imagery to match perfectly.
4. Choose from one of three generated results that fit your newly expanded and resized image.

Using Generative Expand is a non-destructive way to expand and resize your images. It’s a great tool if your photo isn’t quite right for its purpose, and you don’t wish to crop any further from it.

Resize an image layer with the Transform tool

Transform an image to resize it within your Photoshop project

The previous steps have focused on resizing everything within your Photoshop artboard, assuming the resized piece is the final outcome. But if you have multiple layers of images, you can easily resize individual images in your project.

Select the layer your image is on, then select the image using the Move tool (V). This ensures no other elements are selected and you’ll only resize this one. Then go to Edit > Free Transform (cmd + T / ctrl + T) or choose Transform > Scale. Both offer the same ability to resize selected elements.

Click and drag any of the anchor points to resize your image. To retain the proportions and avoid stretching and warping, ensure the Aspect Ratio lock is switched on — you’ll find it as a link icon between H and W in the upper toolbar.

If Aspect Ratio is switched off, you can keep the ratio locked by holding down cmd/ctrl while scaling up or down.

Photoshop offers many ways to resize images

Although the Image Size tool is the default standard for resizing images, and it’s the best way to resize the dimensions of final outputs, Photoshop offers other tools that can help with different resizing results. Whether you’re cropping or increasing your image’s borders, or resizing one image in your whole project, the tools Photoshop offers make any of these options easy.