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Say for instance I have pressed Print Screen and cut the following image:

enter image description here

Now I wish to scale this down to about 338 width and 338 px height. However when I do this in Paint (I know, noob program) I get the following result:

enter image description here

Which looks somewhat compressed and ugly.

So my question is: How would you go around doing stuff like this? Are there any free programs that can help you?

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  • 1
    You simply need to scale proportionally.
    – Scott
    Mar 2 '14 at 23:36
  • The size you offer is not realistic! you clearly have a long rectangular image, the width is clearly much longer than the height! but the size you want is the same for both (338) which clearly a square! the image will be "squished" and thus produce the result you saw. Without cropping and losing some of the image, it cannot be a square! but if you want to keep the proportions as they are, then the above answer is correct. you only input the width size that you desire, and the height will be calculated automatically.
    – user52006
    Oct 5 '15 at 18:14
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You just need to tell Paint to keep the ratio when scaling. This is what my paint (Windows 8) looks like, but there should be a similar command in yours if your OS is different:

enter image description here

If you need to work with images I suggest you download a copy of The Gimp. It's free, open source and quite easy to use. The same dialog as above in Gimp will look something like this. The little chain icon is the one that tells the re-size to keep proportions:

enter image description here

See the image source and detailed instructions to re-size in Gimp.

Gimp has a lot of tutorials worth checking as well.

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