Use Bicubic Sharper for Web Resizing

We posted a while back on how to sharpen your photos like Flickr for smaller resolution images. The technique used “Unsharp Mask”, but today we’ll quickly describe how you can ensure sharpness using a simple setting.

When you reduce the size of an image in Photoshop, there’s an option on the Image Size screen that allows you to choose how the image is resampled (shown above). By default, this is set to “Bicubic”, but that’s not optimal for shrinking photographs down to smaller sizes for the web. Instead, you should use “Bicubic Sharper” to preserve the sharpness in your photo.

Here’s a demonstration of the difference. The following photograph was resized from 3883px wide down to 500px using “Bicubic”:

Now compare that photograph with the following version, which we resized using “Bicubic Sharper”:

You can hover your mouse over either photograph to compare it the other (you might have to wait a few seconds to see the change).

To set “bicubic sharper” as your default, go to

Preferences->General->Image Interpoation->Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction)

If you’ve been resizing images poorly in the past, you should now see a noticeable increase in sharpness! Yay!

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