problems making a website banner

[crockny]

Hi - I'm following a tutorial from here on making a banner. I created a CS4 document 740 pixels by 140 pixels with a transparent background. It's 300 dpi because that's what the default is. My photos are 300 dpi. When I select and copy and paste into the banner the photos are incredibly huge and I have a terrible time manipulating them with Ctrl T to get them down to size and then they look horribly pixelated ... any idea what I'm doing wrong?

[BuddhaPi]

resize your images down to 140 pixels first, then drag them in a s a new layer..when done use the save for web option which will bring it down to 72dpi for web...

[crockny]

I'm pretty sure I tried that and they still looked pixelated - but I will try again when I get home ...

[kcoppock]

Ignore the dpi setting, it's not relevant*. I would suggest using File > Place... rather than copying and pasting the image. This will insert it as a Smart Object, and you can resize it as many times as you need without affecting the original quality of the image. Also, placing will pre-apply a transform to fit it within the bounds of your canvas (you can confirm this transformation with either the checkbox in the control bar, or by hitting Enter on the number pad).

Another helpful tip, if you are having a difficult time resizing very large images on a canvas, press Ctrl-T to bring up the transform bounding box, then press Ctrl-0 and it will shrink the view to fit all the handles in the transformation.

*In this case, the only difference it will make is just how large the image is on your canvas when it's placed into the document. For web display, though, the only thing that matters for the final output is the pixel dimensions.

[crockny]

Thanks I will try File - Place -- can you put a mask on a smart object? I'm not familiar with them -- I need to blend three photos together ...

I did the Ctrl-T Ctrl-0 thing and it shrunk my banner to miniscule size - it was very annoying ... I had a huge picture which I shrunk with the handles but the banner was the size of a toothpick so I had to futz around with enlarging that while shrinking the photo - not fun ...

[kcoppock]

Yes, you can still use layer masks with Smart Objects. The Ctrl-T, Ctrl-0 doesn't change your banner size, it just zooms out the view. Just resize the handles until it's closer to the size of the canvas, and you can then zoom back in with Ctrl+ and Ctrl- for finer tuning. Or you can just hit Ctrl-Alt-0 to bring it back to 100% zoom.

[sk66]

Make sure the DPI settings for the two documents are the same..and deselect "resample" when changing the DPI.
Your banner is probably not at 300dpi but is being resampled up when pasted into the 300dpi image....It usually throws a warning dialogue and asks if you want to convert to match (choose no in this case)

[crockny]

I created the banner as a new doc at 300 dpi ... no resampling involved.
File - Place did not work for me, 1) because I don't want to use the whole file, just a section and 2) it still was a little pixelated!
The only thing that seemed to work fairly well was cropping the section of photo I wanted, and resizing to a height of 140 pixels using the resampling formula that says its best for reduction ... that produced the least amount of pixelating so far ...
None of this was discussed in the tutorial I'm following ... oh well, I'm learning a lot ... not used to working in pixels!

[kcoppock]

Originally Posted by crockny

I created the banner as a new doc at 300 dpi ... no resampling involved.
File - Place did not work for me, 1) because I don't want to use the whole file, just a section and 2) it still was a little pixelated!
The only thing that seemed to work fairly well was cropping the section of photo I wanted, and resizing to a height of 140 pixels using the resampling formula that says its best for reduction ... that produced the least amount of pixelating so far ...
None of this was discussed in the tutorial I'm following ... oh well, I'm learning a lot ... not used to working in pixels!

Again, you can disregard the dpi setting since it's just for web display. I would still recommend File > Place, and just add a mask layer mask over the parts you don't want to show. You also have to realize, downsampling to that extent is going to throw away the majority of the image data. Using a Smart Object is going to minimize the detrimental effects should you end up resizing it more than once, though. Could you possibly post a sample of what you're seeing as being pixelated? I have a feeling its just quality loss from downsampling.

[crockny]

Unfortunately my landline and DSL are inoperative at the moment (I'm at work) and I can't upload anything right now -- not for a couple of days, assuming Verizon comes on the day they say they're coming ... lousy service ...