How to resize an image in 3 steps.

In order to make sure your canvas print looks as stunning in real life as it does in your imagination, your image has to pass our image quality test before we let you proceed with your pixelpaint order. If the image passes you can proceed with your order straight away. If it fails, you'll get a message saying 'Ops, this image has a bad resolution', which basically means your image is too small and you can't use it. As a result we get emails like this literally one million times a day:



“Hi, your website won’t let me use my image. It says it has a bad resolution. Can you fix it for me?”


Ok, I'm being dramatic, maybe it’s a little less than one million... but you get what I mean. It takes about 10 seconds to resize an image, but because we get sooooo many emails, it can take us one million years to resize each individual image.  And why wait millions of years for something you could easily do yourself in less than a minute? You’re probably thinking, ‘shut up internet person, I don’t know how to resize things’. Well, we’re going to teach you how to resize ALL of the things, relax!


This one time we wrote an image resize tutorial for ya’ll using picnik, but then picnik decided not to exist anymore. So on to bigger and better things (things called Aviary, which we've blogged about before)! To get started, go here:  


http://advanced.aviary.com/tools/image-editor, click ‘Launch Phoenix’, and follow the instructions below.


I’m going to teach you how to resize your image so it will work for ANY and ALL of our canvas sizes. That’s right, I said it. ANY and ALL. And I'm going to do it in 3 steps. 


Step 1: Once Aviary is open, click file > new document > load an image from file. From here you need to select your image from it’s location on your computer, or enter the URL for image if it islocated online.


Step 2: Once your image is loaded on the screen infront of you, click image > image resize. You’ll get this window:

We’re going to crank the pixel dimension right up to full speed  on either the height or width measurement (the other measurement will automatically adjust itself). Make sure you have ‘constrain proportions’ ticked as show in the image about. Next click ‘apply’, and BOOM, the resize is complete! 


Step 3: Now you just have to save the image to your computer as a JPG and you can upload it to our website. Click file > export image > and then save it to your computer. Make sure you chose to save it as a JPG, and make sure your quality is set to ‘100,’ as shown in the image below.

Next click 'generate image' and once it's done, click 'download'. Make sure you save it to your desktop or somewhere you’ll remember! Too easy right?


Please keep in mind that resizing your image doesn't automatically mean it’s going to look good.  Someone smart somewhere once said, “You can’t polish a turd”. If your image looks pixelated and blurry after the resize, we advise you find a larger image as this is what it is going to look like once we print it on to canvas for you. You’ve been warned!