: How do I make images smaller without making them darker? OK - my manager hit me with this one today, and I need a reality check. She asked me to color-correct an image because, "images get

@Courtney195

I've run into this. I don't know why it happens, but here's my workaround.


I put all my layers in a folder.
Duplicate the Folder
Turn off the original folder.
Merge the layers of the Duplicated folder.
Now when you export, photoshop is resizing off of your merged layers and it seems to work fine vs. getting darker.

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@Shelley277

As posted by others, an image will not technically become darker if you shrink it (with a good algorithm).

However... our brain can play weird tricks on us with perception. A certain color may look "greenish" to us in a white surrounding, or totally different with another context. I can very well imagine that smaller images can -in certain cases- be perceived darker when made smaller. It seems very acceptable feedback to me if a user says:

"Hmmm, now that the image is smaller, it feels much 'darker'. I think we should make it a little brighter."

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@Sherry384

The quality of the image is paramount and/or when you're using an already low-quality image within Photoshop (assuming it's already been rasterized) it'll pixelate and yes, interpolate the best it can but altogether degrade in quality.

But without an example to compare the two... even the a portion of the example to compare side-by-side it's gonna be like finding a needle in ... well you get the point.

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@Kristi941

There's an obvious test here(that you haven't said you did): have you actually confirmed that your manager isn't nuts by directly comparing areas of color between an original and one of your downscaled images?

Even if there is, this is probably not directly a result of scaling, but rather something in the export options which come into play after the actual scaling within Photoshop, ie. the "Convert to sRGB" toggle, whether you're embedding a color profile, etc.

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@Radia820

I've never noticed a color change from shrinking. Sometimes fonts will become pixelated, but not darker. I would compare the two side by side and adjust Gamma if necessary..

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