How To Resize Images with Affinity Designer

• May 14, 2021
• Nick Saporito
• 9 comments

Affinity Designer is one of the most versatile design applications in existence. Not only does it handle vectors as well as its industry-standard adversary, but it also has an entire suite of tools meant for editing photos and images. Today’s tutorial will be a demonstration of such. We’ll be going over how to resize images with Affinity Designer, and then export them in any format you’d like, at their new size.

In order to resize images with Affinity Designer we’ll need to work with two tools — the Move Tool for the resizing, and then the Artboards Tool to change the size of the document to match the resized image. Then, we’ll be using the Export Persona to export the resize image in your desired file formats.

This tutorial would be an excellent lesson to follow along with if you’re a beginner. It makes for a nice introduction to some of these essential tools.

Resize Images with Affinity Designer

The following video tutorial will walk you through the process of resizing your images, resizing the artboard to match the resized image, and then exporting your work:

Continue on for the written instructions.

Step 1: Open your image with Affinity Designer

To get us started, we must first open our image in Affinity Designer. To do this, navigate to File > Open and locate the image you’d like to resize on your hard drive.

For this demonstration I will be resizing the following example image:

It is recommended that you open your image as a new document, using the Open prompt, as suggested above. Do not import your image into an already existing document, otherwise this tutorial might not work as expected.

Step 2: Resize your image using the Move Tool

Once we’ve opened our image, we’ll be using the Move Tool to resize it. However, we must unlock the layer in order to do so.

Click the little lock icon next to your image layer’s name in the Layers menu:

Your layer must be unlocked before you’ll be able to resize it.

Once the layer is unlocked, you should notice round handles in the corners of your image. To resize an image with Affinity Designer all you have to do is grab one of those handles to scale it up or down:

After resizing your image, you’ll notice a checkerboard pattern in the space that the original image occupied.

By default, your image will scale with the aspect ratio locked in place. This ensures that you do not distort your image. If you’d like to distort the image, simply hold the Shift key while scaling.

If you’d like to resize your image based on a specific numerical value, you can do so using the Transform menu, which is located at the bottom-right corner of your screen:

The Transform menu is located in the bottom-right corner of the screen, and it allows you to resize an image based on a specific numerical value.

The W value represents the width of the image and the H value represent its height. Make sure to enable the Lock Aspect Ratio icon to the right if you’d like to ensure that your image is not distorted as it is resized. If you’d like to distort your image then leave it disabled.

Step 3: Change the size of your artboard to match the resized image

Once you’re finished resizing your image, you’ll have to change the size of the canvas (or “artboard” as it’s called) to accommodate the newly-resized image. Although you may have scaled down your image, the document boundaries are still set to the original image’s dimensions.

To do this, we’ll be using the Artboards Tool, which can be accessed just below the Move Tool in the tools menu. Before grabbing the Artboards Tool though, make sure that you still have your image selected.

Once selected, look towards the top of the screen where the tool options menu is. Change the Size dropdown menu to Selection and then click the Insert Artboard button:

This will get rid of the old page border and apply a new canvas that is sized based on the dimensions of your newly-resized image:

By default, your new artboard will be titled “Artboard 1”.

Step 4: Export your resized image using the Export Persona

There’s no point to resizing images with Affinity Designer if they only exist in Affinity Designer. Chances are, you’ll want to use your newly-resized image elsewhere, meaning we’ll have to export our work in a usable file format.

First, change the name of your layer from “Artboard 1” to whatever you’d like the saved file name to be. This can be done by clicking on the layer name:

The name of the layer will dictate the name of the exported file.

For this demonstration, I will be naming my resized image “Resized-Image” (clever, I know.)

Now we can export the image using the Export Persona. To access it, navigate to File > Personas > Export.

Look for the Slices menu on the right-hand side of your screen, where the Layers menu typically is. Select the slice labeled with your chosen file name, then click the little arrow next to it to expand the menu:

Make sure to export at 1x, as depicted above. Otherwise your resized image will export at a different size than what you set it as.

From here, you can choose the file type you’d like to export your resized image as. By default, the image’s original file format will be chosen. In my example it would be JPEG format, so that’s what I’ll be exporting it as.

All you have to do now is press the Export Slices button at the bottom of the menu and you will be prompted to choose a location on your hard drive to save your image.

Once chosen, you are finished! Navigate to the location to ensure that your image is there, and that’s it. That is how you can resize images with Affinity Designer.

Conclusion

This tutorial is barely scratching the surface of what Affinity Designer is capable of when it comes to editing images. Not only can you resize images with Affinity Designer, but you can also crop images, delete white backgrounds, and more. Check out the plethora of tutorials I have on this channel to learn more about what this powerful application can do.

If you have any questions or need clarification for any of the steps in this tutorial, simply leave a comment below.

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