So the trick is scan at high resolution. Scan at a higher resolution than you need, and then down sample inside Photoshop to the size you really want to work.

Now, that does not really necessarily make sense. You might thing well, if you are wanting to add detail to an image, you would want to up sample the image, you want to add pixels, but turns out when working inside Photoshop, when scaling an image, you most likely are going to want to delete pixels from an image. You are going to want a captures as many pictures as you can in the first place, open those up inside Photoshop, and then reduce the pixels down to the number of pixels you actually need.

All right, so how do we go about down sampling this image, reducing the number of pixels?

Well of course, we are going to choose that same command. I am going to go up to the image menu, choose the image size command, or take advantage of the keyboard shortcut, and notice this image measures a whapping 8,422 pixels by 5,700 pixels tall. That is a total of 48 million pixels inside this image. Now, we are talking.

Most digital cameras cannot get anywhere near that.

Right now, a typical, pretty high end camera is anywhere from -- let us say 6 to 12 megapixels, we are talking 48 megapixels. This is enormous all right? And it is still is giving us the same 7 inches wide by 4.75 inches tall. But this time, the resolution is 1,200 pixels per inch. Just per linear inch.

It deifies imagination how many pixels are getting pack in here?

Now, two things we can do at this point to reduce the size of the image. One thing is, we could just reduce the print size. Okay, let me show you how that works.

If you turn on off the re-sample image check box, what that means is no matter what options you change down here, notice the pixel dimensions. They are now fixed in place. So, there is no longer editable option. They are now fixed values. So, they stay the same.

Any changes you make to these values right here are only going to affect the printed size of the image. We are not going to change the number of pixels at all. So if I decide to change the resolution to 600, let us say, then the size of the printed image is going to grow. So, we reduce the resolution, the printed size grows. We increase the resolution, the printed size shrink.

And now, the image is going to be a whapping 14 inches wide by 9.5 inches tall. If we want to reduce the size of the image, let us say I want it to be only -- let us say 4 inches wide. That makes the resolution of the image 2,100 pixels per inch; actually, a little more. So, that is just changing the printed size of the image.

I am going ahead and reset the values inside this dialog box by pressing the option key or the Alt key in the PC and clicking on what use to be the Cancel button when option or Alt is damage changes to the reset button. So, go ahead and click it with option or Alt down, it restores our previews values.

What if we want to actually genesen some of these pixels because printing an image at 2,100 pixels per inch is ridiculous. That is just that is a nuts! That is just requiring your printer to do too much work. You are requiring Photoshop to do too much work or just wasting a lot of time.

They say that you should not really go beyond 300 pixels per inch for photographic images with linear images, you probably do not want to go much beyond 600 to 1200; some place in there is where you want the resolution to be. So, anything beyond that is completely wasted.

Well, let us say in our case, we want to keep the resolution at 1200, fine, but I want to turn this into a piece of spa dart that is about 4 inches wide.

So, I reduce the width value to 4 inches, the height value also goes down at 2.7 in kind because constraint proportion is turned on, but the number of pixels inside the image really drops. And also, the size of the image in memory really drops from 46 Megs down to about 15 Megs, mass and minus.

All right, now I am going to click Okay in order to accept this modification. So now, I am about to lose pixels inside the image. If you want to adjust the weigh in which you are going to lose pixels, you change this value right here. For example, you might change it to bi-cubic sharper to keep nice sharp edges. But in this case, I do not really want to. I am just going to say Bicubic -- we are just going to let it a little soft. Certainly, we want went bi-cubic smoother. That will make it overly smooth; we lose some details if we do that.

Bicubic is probably the best for this specific image. Now, I am going to click Okay to accept that modification.