Resizing Photos

[caleb]

Ok, I can think of three reasons to resize photos:
-Printing?
-Web
-Editing*

Printing has a question mark next to it because I have been using full res files (even for 4x6).This doesn't seem right to me because I've read that sharpening should be done for final output size AND I have a feeling using the techniques you guys will tell me will downsize the files for printing a lot better than the photo lab.

Web. This one's obvious. Two concerns are file size and, as above, downsizing that may degrade image quality. Again... I work on full size images, check everything at 100% which is usually 7-10x larger what I output the file as.

*Editing. I starred this one because today is the first time I ran into ever wanting to resize for editing. I was making the attached image. Since it's 6 or 7 merged files, my width was something obscene like 12,000 px. Although I didn't notice too much processor lag, I can see that it's at least plausible for me to want to resize so that I'm not working with such massive files.

What I currently do: All post processing techniques at full size. Sharpen until I see halos at 100% (sometimes I sharpen on multiple layers if I have like skin, trees, and maybe a cell phone or something that can take a lot more sharpening). File>Save for web/other devices... I use this the same for outputting to web and when getting together files for printing. I use maximum jpg output (unless file size is an issue) with sRGB color profile.

What I should be doing: [see posts below]