Reducing the size of a layer without lowering the quality

[spiral prawn]

I really want to decrease the size of that pokemon but only as a layer of that picture, but making it smaller destroys it's quality, is there any way to reduce the size of that one layer without it's quality being affected ?

[vernal condor]

What is the purpose of the image, print? web? Reduce the size will "reduce the quality" but will adjust the quality for the new size. If you are looking the image above 100% zoom will look with low quality because you are too close to the image, seeing the pixels bigger than they really are.
But one thing you can do to "protect" the quality of the image, is do a right click on the layer and choose "convert to smart object" so you can size the image without loose pixel data, so if you recude the size, and increase again at other moment, the imagem will keep the original quality.

[proud depot]

Short answer. NOPE!

Imagine if I wanted to reduce that image to the size of 4x4 pixels. - that would mean that photoshop has to render the whole image using 16 blocks of colour.

Obviously, if you were literally given 16 blocks, each one of them could be any solid colour you want, you still physically couldn't improve the 'quality' of the image.

It's the same logic here.

Obviously I'm taking it to extreme levels with my examples here. - but the same logic applies. - the smaller the image, the fewer pixels (or colour blocks) photoshop is left with, to render the image.

[spiral prawn]

It's used as a sprite in a game, but obviously the bigger the sprite the bigger it appears in the game, no i would need to make this very big picture as small as possible without it being horrible looking, and convert it to a smart object won't be of use since i don't need it's sized to be increased afterwards

[spiral prawn]

Absolutly makes sense, just wanted to know if there was any miracle solution that could solve this

[proud depot]

To confirm, if you took a 100,000 pixel NASA image as a smart object and placed it in 200px canvas, it would STILL look rubbish.