Aspect Ratio and Image Resizing for the Clueless

The one on the right is distorted, Joshua...

We've met an astonishing number of people over the years who claim to be "computer literate." Most of them meant, in reality, only that they could run Microsoft Office programs and find information with Google. Duh. As for everything else, many found themselves up information creek without a clue. Sadly, a lot of the clueless types somehow managed to convince themselves they could make beaucoup bucks freelancing, offering their services to the likes of eHow.com: that's how Joshua Laud managed to pick up a few £ by writing tripe like "How to Resize Images Without Distortion," which Leaf Group has proudly moved to Techwalla. Oops...

Sadly, Laud's entire educational experience – three years getting an English Lit degree – never exposed him to the concept of aspect ratio. That's apparently why Joshua spent his entire post explaining that

"Resizing images is different to cropping because it maintains the original image while simply making it larger or smaller. Distortion occurs during image resizing when you attempt to increase the size of an image. Increasing the physical size of an image stretches the pixels of the image, becoming more clear as the size increases. This is also referred to as pixilation [sic]..."

...which our dictionary renders as "pixelation," but that's not the point: the point is that pixelation is not always the same thing as distortion. What Joshua fails to understand is that a distorted image is more likely to be one in which the ratio of the original image width to its resized width is not the same as the ratio between the original and new lengths (or vice versa). Had Laud the foggiest notion what he was talking about, he would not have ordered his readers to use Windows Live Photo Gallery (which no longer exists, and was never available for iOS or Linux). He would also have never told them to

"Click 'File' and then 'Resize.' Click the 'Select a size' drop-down menu and choose a smaller size..."

No, if the boy had any idea what he was talking about, he would have simply told his readers to

1. Open the image in whatever graphics software you have available
2. Use the software's "resize" utility
3. Set resize to "maintain aspect ratio" and pick either a new width or height. 
4. Bingo...

...and that would be that. Sadly, Joshua was so unfamiliar with one of the most basic graphics tasks that he could neither discuss it sensibly nor provide generic instructions for resizing. Heck, our Dumbass of the Day was so unprepared that he didn't know the phrase "aspect ratio." We wonder if he knows it even yet...

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