Lee

Someone told me that when you resize you should select Bicubic Shaprer (instead of regular Bicubic) when going down in size and Bicubic Smoother when increasing the size of an image. I tried it but did not notice a big change but that doesn't mean it doesn't do a better job. I also did not dramatically increase or decrease the size.

Does anyone know if there is any merit to this?

p?tr?

Well, I think it depends on the image and how much you are resizing. If you downsize an image just a little, all that 'bicubic shaper' does is sharpen the image. If it look to jaggedy, then you should use plain 'bicubic'. If downsizing drasticly (say an avater) you might want to bicubic sharper.
As for upsizing, 'bicubic smooter' is probably a good choice because when you blow up an image it tends to get pixelly and using bicubic smoother help to smooth it out.
As for myself, I choose the one that looks best to my eye. If one look bad, I use another.

Sark

Lee.

I'm using PS7, so I don't have these options, but I think you have it back to front. When you down sample the image will appear sharper because your discarding pixels...ie: every four pixels of blurred edges would reduce to two pixels if the image was down sampled by 50%...hence you may want to use smoother. The opposite is true for upsampling, which is why sharpening is required.

Personally, I would just use the standard Bicubic and sharpen after resampling. It's rare that I would want to soften an image , but if I was down sampling considerably, for say, web display, smoother would be a consideration, or just soften the image prior to down sampling.

Sark