Fitting images to designated sizes without disproportioning them: a tutorial

[angelic_wounds]

This is a tutorial for the lovely Mel.
[Proceed to the Drift]Okay, so let's get started without further do. For this tutorial, I will use the template you gave me, and take a piece of it. So, I will work in this area.

From this
I will be using this 
.

I will be using one gif to fit in each. For example, let's take the 245x85. If I select the Image > Image Size option, I can resize my gif to 245px wide. However, I have a small problem, since the template requires the height to be 85px. If I try to resize the gif to 245x85, the gif comes out disproportioned like this.

which is really not what we want. So how do we tackle such problems, you ask?

• First of all, we never untick the Constrict Proportions option on the Image Size.
• If we are clear on that, there are two ways of dealing with such problems.
• The first, which is more for wider, rectangular shaped spaces is to crop our image. Yes, it sounds weird, cause we don't want to have one eye instead of the whole face, and that is why we generally avoid close-to-face scenes for these shapes.
• Now if I resize my image to 245px, it says this.

but our requested height is 85px. And this is where our rules come in:

• If the image you resized is resized by width and the height is bigger, you can either crop the height to the designated amount or
• you can type your designated height and adjust the width, by also cropping it.
• Never, ever try to resize the images to the exact size by using Image Size alone. Unless you are really lucky and it fits.
• Now, I will do it both ways. I set the Width to 245px, and I will crop the image to 85px of Height, cropping as much I can without alienating the image much. Here is the result.

which in all aspects, is not really nice.

• Thankfully, this wonderful image has a lot of width to spare, so I will set the height to 85px using Image Size, and try to crop the width of the image.
• But oh, unfortunately, when I do this, the width becomes 164px, which is really small.
• So, if the image does not fit the shape well, you just place it in another, and choose a better fitting image for the shape you left instead.
• If I place Castiel in the upper rectangular shape, which requires 145px, it will fit much better, because I have extra 21px I can crop, which leads us to this.

see how better it looks, and closer to the original material?

To conclude

• you really need to weigh your images, see if they can fit in the requested shapes.
• Use Crop, never Resize twice.
• You have Height and Width. Tweak with both :)
• Practise, and you will be able to judge better on which images and gifs to use.
• Usually, videos with 1920px quality fit better in rectangular shapes. 640px are harder, since they are closer to a square shape.

Good luck!