In our latest post, Castle’s Head of Creative, Pete Richardson will elaborate on how to increase the resolution of an image without Photoshop.

Image resolution is such a critical component of a website, especially with the brand and design. Striking that balance of image quality and the image file size is a necessity. Simply put, you don’t want low file-sized images on your website that look blurry – ultimately damaging your reputation as you have poor imagery. On the other hand, you don’t want images that are too large as they can cause a substantial negative impact on your page(s) health.

Below you will find my tips on how to strike a balance of image quality that your website and visitors will prefer as well as answering how to increase the resolution of an image without photoshop.  

What is image resolution?

Image resolution is ultimately the quality of an image. So, this means that the higher the resolution of an image, the higher quality the image will be. This also means that should your image be a lower quality – the more pixelated a lower file size is. This is what happens when you view an image on a browser and find that the image can be quite blurry.

Ensuring your images are of high quality is always paramount, especially for websites and even more so for marketing agencies such as Castle.

Two colleagues working on Photoshop editing an image.

How do resolution sizes benefit and hinder a website?

Although good quality images are important, it’s worth keeping an eye on the file sizes of your images. Especially when you are uploading frequently. One thing you want to ensure is that your images and their file sizes do not slow down a website, as this can lead to traffic deciding to leave the website to find their information elsewhere.

This works the opposite for an image with lower quality resolution. You will have a far faster load time for sure, but the potential detriment being the image may look a lot less appealing and blurry. To maintain the quality of an image while ensuring it has a low file size, I recommend the use of TinyPNG. TinyPNG allows you to lower the file size of an image without losing the sharpness or quality of the images.

A blurry image overlooking a selection of buildings with a set of glasses in the centre to demonstrate how to increase the resolution of an image without photoshop.

Can you increase the resolution of an image without photoshop?

Increasing the resolution of an image without photoshop can be done for sure. Photoshop tends to be the go-to design application to use, and it is within good reason for it to be.

As shown in a previous post, Photoshop can be used for many things, even including animations. But for those who do not have Photoshop or the Adobe suite in general – there are certainly ways in order to increase the resolution of an image without photoshop. 

How to increase resolution of an image without Photoshop?

There’s plenty of resizing tools available for you to show you how to increase the resolution of an image without photoshop. In fact, there are hundreds of applications available.

Simply enter a Google search for image resizing and with that, you will find hundreds of applications out there to choose from. Various online applications just need you to enter your required pixel size and your resolution, and it’ll do it for you there. A very good web application I recommend is Resize Image. Resize image offers plenty of options to play about with so you can get the quality images you need.

Not only that, but the backend of websites has this feature now too. WordPress provides plenty of plugins to address this issue. However, it is worth noting that you need to ensure you aren’t using too many plugins as this can drastically hinder the performance of the website.

Other website platforms offer resizing tools as well, such as Shopify’s image resizer. Regardless of your knowledge of Photoshop or the Adobe Suite in general, there’s plenty of tools to show you how to increase the resolution of an image without photoshop.