I downloaded the original image and ran a resize operation with the convert tool from ImageMagick. This was the command line:

convert aluminum_fence_4.jpg -resize 300x225 fenceout.jpg

And this is the result:

http://i.imgur.com/wJXnSD3.jpg

It looks similar to the good result from Photoshop to me. Thus, I don't think there are any fancy content-aware algorithms at work here.

I'd recommend adding ImageMagick to your toolbox.

http://imagemagick.com/script/index.php 

playing with it a bit, found this guide which recommends the following:

convert ~/Downloads/aluminum_fence_4.jpg -colorspace RGB -resize 300x225 -colorspace sRGB fenceout.png

result. This is better than photoshop I think? Note the left side of the fence doesn't go to a black blur as much. 

Hm, I thought moire artifacts were normal to expect from resampling if you did not add blurring beforehand.

Checkout graphicsmagick, there rarely is a reason to prefer imagemagick to it. It is much faster and stable. 

I had no idea IM had liquid rescaling though, that looks fun http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/animate_lqr.gif 

That's interesting.

I haven't experimented with Photoshop's other re sampling algorithms. There is also 'Bicubic Sharper' for down-scaling images.

But yes - these is a difference with the images - Photoshop seems to be as smooth as I.M. but it makes the fence uprights and the branches of the tree look thicker than I.M. weird eh?! 

I chose ImageMagick in favor of GraphicsMagick a few years ago because IM had better support than GM for certain SVG features at the time. However, since they are invoked with different commands, you can easily install both on your system, and use whatever works best. Good call, Spirit. 

"I chose ImageMagick in favor of GraphicsMagick a few years ago because IM had better support than GM for certain SVG features at the time. However, since they are invoked with different commands, you can easily install both on your system, and use whatever works best."

Or, you know, use Photoshop. :P 

Photoshop is a bit expensive. :) 

$10 a month if you take the cheapest subscription. But yeah, it's not free. 

More like $120 for a yearly subscription, you can't get $10 for just one month for instance. It's still pretty expensive for any kind of casual use in my opinion, there are lots of good apps you can just buy for less than $120.

I wouldn't pay $10 to resize an image anyways. ;) 

Did they change it? Are you locked in for a year now or something? Lame... 

around �400 per year! 

 

Well, the phrase "whatever works best" admits the possibility of using Photoshop in the situations where it works best. I am not against doing such a thing. At least not in the privacy of your own home or place of employment.

However, I was writing in the context of command-line tools and if this search result is accurate and up to date wrt to Photoshop's capabilities, it doesn't have much in the way of command-line functionality.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1445540

I'm pretty sure I wasn't implying that you should do all your image manipulation operations from the command line using (Graphics|Image)Magick tools. If somebody thought I was saying that, let me clarify that I only suggest using these tools in addition to what software you already are using.

:b 

http://andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.ca/2015/05/the-tech-arms-race-in-aaa-and-why-im.html 

tl:dr 

May I suggest Krita, free and powerful.

https://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/aluminum_fence_4_300.jpg

Since Krita has bicubic filtering that looks roughly as good as Photoshop's but Krita is free while PS is $$$$$, it might be worth a look. It is also very good for digital painting.

And since Krita has this feature, it'll eventually make its way into Gimp. Open source graphics apps are collaborating quite a lot currently. 

I mean I have PS through work - I couldn't convince the director to cut back on that if I tried, but that's still great news because I can only install CS on two hosts (!) and it would be pretty handy to be able to get good downsampling on GIMP. :D 

A way to do it with GIMP is to apply Gaussian Blur before scaling down, for example when scaling down by 8 apply Gaussian Blur 8 beforehand and so on.

The result looks identical to the Krita one, good enough I would say.

I guess Photoshop does this automatically. 

I just tested the theory. I scaled the image down by a factor of exactly 7.68, I could only gaussian blur to an accuracy of 7.7, I do get slight banding on some of the fence uprights, but its way less noticeable than the vanilla GIMP versions. It makes sense to me why this works, but it's not perfect. 

Yeah, with free software it's always a race to try and implement the functionality of commercial packages.

It's pretty amazing that stuff like GIMP or the newer OSS graphics apps such as Krita, mypaint, or Inkscape even exist. But of course they could always be better.

I've heard the next version of GIMP will finally support 16 bit images! 

has been a free download for awhile now.

http://www.redmondpie.com/download-adobe-photoshop-cs2-for-free-legally-while-you-still-can/

I like gimp and open source stuff like blender but it's not exactly an industry standard 

It's only legal to use if you own a license for it. It is not free. If you don't care about that you could just go ahead and pirate a modern version.

If you have to care about an industry standard it doea not sound like a private hobby and you probably should buy it? 

 

Blender is very, very close to becoming an industry standard, and Krita has become very popular. Take a look at the Blender thread on polycount.