All Photoshop can do is guess at what the new pixels should look like, and then it tries to blend the new pixels in with the originals. And if that sounds like a bad thing, that's because it is. Photoshop needs to add pixels to create detail that wasn't there before. The smaller version usually ends up looking sharper than the original.īut making an image larger than its original size is a whole other thing. It sounds like a bad thing, but the result is just the opposite. To make an image smaller, all Photoshop really needs to do is take some of the pixels from the original image and toss them away.
Or at least, you can't make it larger if you care about image quality.
When it comes to resizing images in Photoshop, the general rule has always been that you can make an image smaller than its original size, but you can't make it larger.