Take a look at these glorious shots.

Beautiful! Great color, detail, and composition.

But there's more than meets the eye at play here...

Here's a 100% crop of this photo:

Pretty sharp, nice detail, very little grain...

And this photo...


Same here, good detail, could use setting the black point, a touch of post processing, light sharpening, but super straight out of the camera...

And this photo...


Oh no! What happened?! Look at the JPG artifacts, the jaggies, the blurriness! Help!

There's the culprit! Resampling! When we do this, we can put any values we want in the height, width, or DPI fields and Photoshop won't argue. Photoshop will invent the image specifications you tell it to.

In this example, we first resized the image to 8x12 (this is PRINT size). We then changed the resolution to 302 PPI. Both of these were done with Resample Image ON.

Here is our new 100% crop. When resizing the image to 8x12 output print size, we lost a LOT of pixels. Then when changing the PPI from 72 to 302, we 'invented' a lot of pixels and we see our result here. Fuzzy, grainy, yucky badness, when we had a super image to begin with. All due to that pesky Resample box.

Had we just unchecked the resample box, it would have simply rearranged the pixels we had in a non-destructive way. But, there is really no reason to do any of this, and we'll tell you why...

Let's start by turning off the badness. When we choose not to resample, we'll be working with the original pixels only. Nothing will be cut, nothing invented.