Making it fit

There are two parts to fitting an image into a space, sizing the image and setting the dpi, and its proportions.

Starting with the proportions, it should be obvious that a square image is not going to fit into a rectangular space without some cropping or distorting the square into a rectangle. What is less obvious is fitting an image that is almost the same proportions as the space into that space without cropping. There are basically four solutions:

1. Crop the image to the correct proportions. This works well if the area to be cropped is unimportant.
2. Change the size of the space to match the proportions of the image. Usually the best, if requirements allow for the space to change.
3. Pad the extra space with a neutral color.
4. Distort the image to fit the space. You would think this would be the last choice, but I would guess that over 90% of the images I have had to work with during 40 years of training development, in PowerPoints, Web Pages, and word processor documents, have been distorted to fit the space. I wouldn't mind so much except that I am often the one handed the documents and told to fix them.

The techniques cropping and fitting could easily fill a full semester's worth of schooling. Every graphics editor has its own quirks. However, I have some simple advice for when you need to copy a graphic from a PowerPoint Slide or from a MS Word document:

Right click on the graphic, go to the sizing and set both axes to 100%. THEN right click and copy. If you don't do that, you will copy whatever distortion the original author put in.