From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Fundamentals of image files - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Fundamentals of image files

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- [Instructor] We want to conquer the digital canvas and being on Photoshop is the first step on that journey is to create a new image file. In the main menu at the very left we find the menu item file, new. And this opens up a dialogue in which we are prompted to adjust a couple of settings. We have the width and the height, probably of our new image file, and resolution. Well, the higher the better right? And color mode and something with bits. Alright, I think at this point we should take a step back and before we can make any informed decision in this dialogue, we should have a brief look at some fundamentals concepts of digital imaging. An image file basically is a matrix of small little squares which are called picture elements or pixels for short. And what we can generally say is that, the more pixels our image is composed of, the better it looks. Take for example these three smileys here. The first one is composed of 20 by 20 pixels and what we can see is that every single pixels is visible and the number of pixels is not really high enough to hold the detail of the design. The smiley in the middle looks much better. It's composed of 40 by 40 pixels, but still we do not really have crisp outlines. It looks rather jagged. The smiley on the right looks nice. It has a smooth silhouette and crisp edges around all the curves here in the design. We would now say that this smiley here is composed of enough pixels to represent our design. But is it? If I zoom in really close, we can see the individual pixels and now what looked very crisp and smooth a moment ago, again looks kind of jagged. So, we really have to take into account how close we are looking in order to decide if the number of pixels in our image file is high enough to hold the detail of our design. To give you a more practical example, let's look at this case here. Let's say we have a nice big screen with a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels. And we have a image file that fills up the whole screen. This means that we could use this image file, put it on a piece of paper, print it out, and it would look just as nice. Well, the circumstances could be less fortunate. We could work on a older laptop with a resolution of, for example, 1280 by 720. And our image file might not fill up the whole screen but only a small portion. If we decided to print this image file on a huge poster format, we could easily see all the pixels that this image file is composed of. The important takeaway here is that we always have to put the number of pixels that our image file is composed of in relation to the physical size we see our image file in, be it on screen or a piece of paper.

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