There are two different methods available to you when you resize graphics in Web Studio.

The standard way is to simply drag one of the image’s handles to increase or decrease its size. When an image is resized this way, its original image is not resized at all. The image is resized when it is drawn, which leaves the original image is left intact. This sometimes results in an image on the screen that is pixilated, jagged, or just messed up visually.

The High Quality way is done by holding down the CTRL key when you resize a graphic. When resized this way, the original image is resized to the size you made it using the high quality algorithm (fancy way of say method). This results in the image looking, well, high quality.

Which method should you use? You need to understand a little more about how Web Studio does thing before an answer will make any sense.

When Web Studio creates the images for your web site it looks at each of the images on the page. If an image is unique (no duplicates of it exist on the page) it looks at the size of the image and then uses, guess what, the High Quality Resizing method to resize it to the correct size for the web site. This method results in the highest quality and the smallest files for your web site.

It also looks to see if there are duplicates of an image. It looks at the size of each duplicate and makes one copy of the image with its size equal to the largest of the duplicates. It uses the, yup, High Quality method to resize it if necessary and uses only that one image for the web site. Each of the smaller duplicates on the web page is displayed using that one image, with the web browser resizing the images as it displays them.

Now you can see, that if you manually resize using the High Quality method, you’re doing essentially what Web Studio will eventually do when it creates your site. This is why High Quality isn’t the “standard” way of resizing; it eventually gets done automatically for you. The only down side to this is that the resized graphic may look junky in Web Studio, which doesn’t really matter since your really making web pages.

Why then, is the High Quality method even offered? Great question. It is offered so your special effects will look better! If you have a big image you’ve inserted into a page and want to add the Canvas texture to it, you should resize the image first with the High Quality method and then drop the texture onto it. Why? Because, if you add the texture and then resize, the texture will be resized as well and won’t look good.