Photoshop Tutorials For Beginners - What Is Pixel Resolution?

Have you edited a photograph on your computer and when you went to print it, it was just a tiny image on the page? Have you ever emailed a digital photo to your mother but the image file size was so big that her inbox rejected your attachment?

Image Resolution

The tiny dots that make up an image are called pixels and resolution is a measurement of how many pixels fit into one inch.

Our televisions, computer displays and even digital cameras are full of pixels - thousands and thousands of them all crammed together so closely it fools the human brain into thinking these tiny dots are a smooth image.

The higher the pixel count within an image, the better the photograph looks. On the contrary, if the pixel count is too low, the image quality degrades. A pixelated image results when the pixel count is so low, you can see the jaggy edges.

Digital camera images have a high pixel count while most home computer displays have a low pixel count, usually under 100 pixels in an inch. Displaying the former on the latter results in an image that appears much bigger than the computer screen. Digital cameras capture images at high resolution to make possible photographic quality prints. But sending this large image file by e-mail will use megabytes of data and many e-mail users will refuse it.

Digital Resolution

The answer is to resample the image which is computer speak for changing the resolution. Decreasing the pixel count makes the image appear normal on a computer display. And this will allow you to e-mail Mom with the latest family photos from your recent vacation. But after decreasing the resolution of the image, don't expect to get a good print anymore since you've removed so many pixels.

So here's what this article is all about. Digital images that will be printed need to be at a high resolution but images displayed on a computer screen need only a low resolution.

If you feel like doing both printing and sharing of your digital images, make a copy of your original digital image for playing around with. Besides allowing for both printing and viewing images correctly, this is also a suggested backup plan for all of your digital photos.

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For a more in-depth explanation of how to re-sample images and more topics on photo resolution, visit www.toNoodle.com for how to use Adobe Photoshop.

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