Resize a Photograph with Paint.NET

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

This tutorial will show you how to quickly resize a photograph so that you can email it to friends or put it on a web page. We'll use a free photo editing program called Paint.NET.

Before you do anything, make a backup copy of the photo you want to resize. It is always a good idea to keep the original file untouched - once you make a photo smaller, you can never go back to the original size without losing detail!

It's also a good idea to print out this tutorial so you can easily use it as a reference. 

You will need Paint.NET for this tutorial. Click here for more information on Paint.NET and how to download it.

Go ahead and start Paint.NET. The main screen will open. Click on the File menu and choose Open. Now select the photo that you would like to resize. For this tutorial, I will be using this photo:

Once the file has opened, click on the Image menu and choose the Resize option. You should see the following box:

Notice that the current file dimensions are shown. My photograph is pretty small already, only 500 pixels wide and 375 pixels high. But I want to make it smaller.

Also notice the Maintain Aspect Ratio checkbox. Make sure that it is checked. By doing so, you can change the value of the width, and Paint.NET will automatically calculate the correct value for the height (or vice versa) so the photo won't get distorted.

I'll change the width of my photo to 300 pixels. 

See? Paint.NET has automatically adjusted the height to 225 pixels.

Set your height and width to values that you want and click OK. Don't be afraid to experiment! Paint.NET has a nice undo function that will quickly restore your photo to its original size (plus, you have that backup copy, right?).

Now, let's save the photo. Click on the File menu and choose Save As... Type in a new file name for your resized photo and click OK. You should now see the box below:

You can now adjust the Quality setting. The higher the quality, the larger the size of the file will be. If you lower the quality, the file size will be smaller. If you don't care about file size at all, just leave the slider at 95% or 100%.

Click OK, and you are done! 

More Paint.NET tutorials:

Crop a Photograph 

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