Designer’s Guide: Photoshop Action – Multiple DPI Resizing for Android

We’ve talked about Android’s DPIs and how we should use Full HD (1920x1080px) documents when creating apps for Android devices so we would create the XXHDPI graphical assets along with any other resolution assets we may require.

Why you need it

Exporting all the graphical elements at 4 or 5 different resolutions can be quite time consuming and a little help can go a long way. So instead of hitting “save for web”, calculating and then resizing for each individual DPI, why not use a scripted action to do the heavy lifting.

How it works

Basically the concept is quite simple: take the largest size image, assume it’s scaled for xxhdpi and make that iteratively smaller while exporting at each step along the way. Take a look at the image below to get a better understanding of the process. The DPI is used for the Android devices the app will finally run on so you can work at 72ppi (pixels/inch) in Photoshop as long as the file you’ve started with is large enough in pixels.

To get a better idea, let’s take the example of a 96px icon at xxhdpi. By the way, this is the size at which you’ll receive all icons if you  download the Android action bar icon pack (all these icons are in vector format so you’ll be able to resize them to whatever you want later on… so you’re not limited to 96px). Now, if the xxhdpi icon is 96x96px, the action will export it, then scale the document to 66.(6)% (66.7% actually), now it’s 64px(xhdpi) export that again and scale the document to 75% and now it’s 48px(hdpi), export and scale the document to 66.7% and now it’s 32px(mdpi), export that and scale the document to 66.7% and now it’s 24px(ldpi) and finally export that.

Now because the resize should be to 66.666666666…% instead of 66.7% I’m still expecting to run into some issues at some point but I’ve been using it for a while and found nothing wrong with the files it creates.

What you get

There are 2 separate actions included in the set. One is called “From Current” which will export the currently used document without any modifications, scaling it down as it goes. This one is useful for icons or any other graphical assets that require padding directly inside the image.

The other one is “In New Document” and it will copy the layers you have selected into a new document, merge the layers and remove any transparent pixels, effectively resizing the new document to the size of the selected layers. Use this last one if you don’t require padding. Button backgrounds and the like can make use of it just before you add 9-patching elements to them like we’ve discussed last week.

If you’re working on Android design, I really hope that it helps, just click “Download” to… download and have fun. If you run into any issues or want to learn more about Android design , just drop a comment down below or send a mail over at madalin@mready.net and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible.

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