How to scale down a image without losing quality

[ArcLight]

Im using GIMP to edit and Im trying to make a skinny image, but problem is it loses quality... help?

[ArcLight]

Originally posted by Lommemannen:

Originally posted by Mr. Mister:

the only way you can scale down an image without loosing quality is if it's a vector graphic... you're always going to loose some degree of quality when shrinking a pixel based (raster) graphic.. the more you scale it down, the more you loose...

I wonder if OP is messing with the aspect ratio to make it fit. Instead of downscaling with fixed ratio or cropping it if neccesary.

Yeah I believe I am, but that's because one of the aspect ratio isn't what I want, I believe it's some like 2560x423

[Profile Name™]

Always start with a large or huge sized PNG image and then rescale using pixel resize.

EDIT: If I remember right, bicubic resize is better than bilinear. And if there is a pixel resize option, just use that.

[Moses The Prophet]

You can't upscale without losing quality but (and I'm not sure if Gimp has this) in some programs you can add a transform mask so you can downscale and scale back to original .

[print(name)]

Originally posted by Aertew:

Originally posted by Lommemannen:

I wonder if OP is messing with the aspect ratio to make it fit. Instead of downscaling with fixed ratio or cropping it if neccesary.

Yeah I believe I am, but that's because one of the aspect ratio isn't what I want, I believe it's some like 2560x423

So that's the YouTube banner dimensions that you want several images to fit I assume.
If the images you want to add in are higher than 423pixels then you can just downscale them (with fixed ratio, very important) and place them beside each other.

I don't know the dimensions of the images you want to add are. But if they are large and very detailed then it will naturally be quite harder to see the details after being scaled down to 423pixel height. You could prevent that as much as possible by cropping the part of each image you think is most important to have, with the same aspect ratio of 2560x423 before downscaling them.

I hope I make some sense. I'm not the best person to write tutorial stuff and I don't know how familiar you are with image editing. So some things that I'm saying may not make much sense to you. But I hope it does.

EDIT: By the way, the aspect ratio of 2560x423 is 6.05:1

[ArcLight]

Originally posted by Lommemannen:

Originally posted by Aertew:

Yeah I believe I am, but that's because one of the aspect ratio isn't what I want, I believe it's some like 2560x423

So that's the YouTube banner dimensions that you want several images to fit I assume.
If the images you want to add in are higher than 423pixels then you can just downscale them (with fixed ratio, very important) and place them beside each other.

I don't know the dimensions of the images you want to add are. But if they are large and very detailed then it will naturally be quite harder to see the details after being scaled down to 423pixel height. You could prevent that as much as possible by cropping the part of each image you think is most important to have, with the same aspect ratio of 2560x423 before downscaling them.

I hope I make some sense. I'm not the best person to write tutorial stuff and I don't know how familiar you are with image editing. So some things that I'm saying may not make much sense to you. But I hope it does.

I think I'm going to make them shorter, because I think they looked great before that, but what do I add in the sides, i.e. I would need some sort of background for them, in the YouTube banner it would be the left side behind the profile picture and the far right side, because I think if it isn't as stretched out it looks fine, but I think your idea is also good.

[print(name)]

Originally posted by Aertew:

Originally posted by Lommemannen:

So that's the YouTube banner dimensions that you want several images to fit I assume.
If the images you want to add in are higher than 423pixels then you can just downscale them (with fixed ratio, very important) and place them beside each other.

I don't know the dimensions of the images you want to add are. But if they are large and very detailed then it will naturally be quite harder to see the details after being scaled down to 423pixel height. You could prevent that as much as possible by cropping the part of each image you think is most important to have, with the same aspect ratio of 2560x423 before downscaling them.

I hope I make some sense. I'm not the best person to write tutorial stuff and I don't know how familiar you are with image editing. So some things that I'm saying may not make much sense to you. But I hope it does.

I think I'm going to make them shorter, because I think they looked great before that, but what do I add in the sides, i.e. I would need some sort of background for them, in the YouTube banner it would be the left side behind the profile picture and the far right side, because I think if it isn't as stretched out it looks fine, but I think your idea is also good.

How many images are you adding to the banner? It won't neccesarily leave any empty pixels left in the banner if you do the cropping trick. It takes a few to fill the width with the banner's aspect ratio so it might not work.
If the images can't fill the width and you don't want to add any more then you can have each side fade to transparency (you must have a transparent base layer for this to work) by using the Blend/Gradient tool on each layer placed on the sides. You can't do fade to white since YouTube now have a dark theme.

You can also make each image's sides that you've added fade smoothly into each other by creating a layer mask and using the Blend Tool. The image that will have a faded side needs to have its side go a little bit over the next one.

I still strongly recommend not changing the ascpect ratio of the original images by just decreasing the height and not the width. It will look weird and smooshed. But it's your choice if you think it looks okay.

[ArcLight]

Originally posted by Lommemannen:

Originally posted by Aertew:

I think I'm going to make them shorter, because I think they looked great before that, but what do I add in the sides, i.e. I would need some sort of background for them, in the YouTube banner it would be the left side behind the profile picture and the far right side, because I think if it isn't as stretched out it looks fine, but I think your idea is also good.

How many images are you adding to the banner? It won't neccesarily leave any empty pixels left in the banner if you do the cropping trick. It takes a few to fill the width with the banner's aspect ratio so it might not work.
If the images can't fill the width and you don't want to add any more then you can have each side fade to transparency (you must have a transparent base layer for this to work) by using the Blend/Gradient tool on each layer placed on the sides. You can't do fade to white since YouTube now have a dark theme.

You can also make each image's sides that you've added fade smoothly into each other by creating a layer mask and using the Blend Tool. The image that will have a faded side needs to have its side go a little bit over the next one.

I still strongly recommend not changing the ascpect ratio of the original images by just decreasing the height and not the width. It will look weird and smooshed. But it's your choice if you think it looks okay.

Oh yeah I forgot to add in I'm fading in one image into another, those are the two screenshots from games I'm using, then the banner template, then some text layers and filters for the text.

[ArcLight]

So far I have a decent fix, I keep both images to 1280x720, so the quality is good, then fix the parts of the screenshots I want into the 2560x423 template, I think its pretty good right now but if anyone has other ideas feel free to tell me, thanks for all the help and thank you whoever told me to cut out the parts I want.