I'm interested in doing a non-destructive "resize" of an image, whereby only the transparent pixels are traditionally resized and the non-transparent pixels remain the same size (but move relative to the resized transparent pixels).  

As an example, imagine an image that consists of stars on a transparent background.  If we were to do the above to this image, the physical space taken up by the image would increase (due to the resizing of the transparent pixels), but the stars themselves would remain the same size.  In short, the stars would appear to spread out to fill more space.

If it helps, here's an illustrated example:

http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll35/jhumpty2424/explanation.jpg

Does anyone know if this is possible in Photoshop?

Thanks.

hi,

change your canvas size?

carlow

...not likely really...

...the example given here is, according to photoshop, is a moving function, in that you need to move the color data, in relation to the pixel grid which is mainly transparent...

...no way i can think of photoshop being made to shift transparent pixels instead...

...an interesting question posed however...

...perhaps one you could present to adobe...

Andrew

...canvas size isn't really the solution here...

...a question i think photoshop cannot answer...

Andrew

...unless you move each shape manually, as long as each one is on a separate layer...

...but i certainly can't think of an automatic/dialog process...

Andrew

Thanks, Andrew.  Yeah, a moving function is exactly what I want.  Basically, I have an image of densely packed stars on a transparent background, and I want to spread the stars out to cover a larger area, but without affecting the scale or size of the stars (e.g. move them).

I was hoping perhaps there was a plugin to do this.  Ah well.

Thanks again for everyone's help, though.

Hi, if I undertand well, only some spreading procecss will give you the result, but I don't know why you search such a difficult approach. When you have your final image, the file has one, and only one, size. If you want to save disk space, don't forget a .psd file compresses data to obtain a file as small as possible without loss, and don't save all the individual pixels as a plain TIFF file. Not sure you smaller example at left give a smaller file size on you disk. Finally, on a given image, ALL pixels have always the SAME size.