When size matters; or, Is vectoring really an option?

It seems to me that webmastering and using Photoshop go hand in hand. Not that I'm a P/S guru by ANY stretch of the imagination, but if I had a nickel for every time I've had to recreate an image, or change the color of an image's background, or do something silly like that... The problem is that I'm really not very knowledgeable about P/S. I never learned how to put celebrity heads on other people's bodies, or to adjust the shadows on a UFO to match the ambient light, so when I have to do something in P/S I wind up spending hours, and not getting what I want really anyway. I remember when I discovered how to select by color range... that was a good day! Anyway, that wasn't the issue today; today it was a size thing.

The office staff have been trying to get some new business cards ordered for as long as I've been here, and it never seems to happen mostly because of the logo. There are a couple of them floating around, and none of them look very good, they're all size or color adjusted versions of what looks like an image scanned from a piece of letterhead. So today our bookeeper/payroll/do-everything-that-no-one-else-wants-to-do expert comes in after having been rebuffed by the printer because she doesn't have the logo in the right format. We looked over the available jpeg files and both agreed that none of them would do, and we tried scanning a copy from an existing business card, and I demonstrated why that wouldn't work, so it was up to us to recreate one using the few tools we had. Fortunately there was a good semblance of one in a word doc, so we at least had something to play with. After poking at it for longer than I should have I passed it back to her, and before long she had it looking pretty good. We pulled it up on my screen, I zoomed in on it, did a screen shot, pasted it into P/S, cropped it down, made the background clear, and voila, we had a pretty good looking logo... except that it was about 12 inches wide... :-P

I tried resizing down to the 3.06 inches wide that would be ideal for the business card, but the fine text was illegible, the edges fuzzy and the font-face pixelated as hell. She called the print shop to see if they could resize it and got the standard answer, "Sure! As long as it's a vectorized graphic!" I really don't know who actually makes vectorized graphics, but I wish they would stop so that all the printing houses would be forced to join us back here on planet earth...

So, I tried zooming back out and going through the copy/paste/crop process again, but before I could get anywhere near small enough the image was already pixelated and unreadable. I tried different file formats (EPS, TIFF, PSD, et al) but no luck... I was about to give up in despair, when I noticed a little option in the image size dialog box called "resample image". I unchecked it, changed the width of the image, and lo and behold, instead decreasing the total pixel count to adjust the image it instead changed the pixel density, so the image was exactly as sharp and clear, just much smaller. I was then able to save the image off in several other formats, getting the size of image I wanted and sacrificing none of the quality, well, maybe not none... but none noticeable. I was very pleased, especially because this solves one of the great P/S mysteries of all time, well at least, to my mind.