Pixels & Resolution

 

A picture element is a singular rectangular point in a large graphic image made with many coloured rectangular points. Picture element has a shorter name known as “pixel”. Computer monitors can display images because the screen is divided into millions of pixels

arranged in columns and rows.

 

These pixels help form an image on the computer. Pixels can display different colour depths; the higher the bit numbers the more colours in each pixel and better the display the image.

 

For example: If the image was 1 bit it would contain up to 2 colours (black & white).

 

But if the image was 2 bit it would contain 4 colours (red, green, blue, black).

 

32 bit images can contain up to 16 million colours.

 

When I talk about resolution it doesn’t matter if it’s an image on the computer and you change the resolution of the image it will look the same on the computer screen. I would only see the difference on print.

 

Let’s say I open up and image in Photoshop and I change the resolution to 72 DPI (dots per inch) you would think the pixels would get smaller, the image does look like it’s become smaller but the pixels don’t get smaller, they do the opposite. The pixels would get bigger becoming bulkier trying to fill in most of the image. I would not notice this in Photoshop but if I print this out I would definitely notice the pixels has the picture becomes a bit blurry.

 

So if I change the image’s resolution to 300 DPI the image will blow up the image in Photoshop but the pixels will not grow bigger but they will become smaller. When putting an image in a higher resolution the pixels will become smaller so that all the different coloured pixels will fit together in a single mega-pixel which is like a pixel but with many colours in it.

 

This helps the image to have better details and to cope with the expansion of the image. When I printed this I noticed that the 300 DPI image was bigger than the 72 DPI print out but the images have the same quality so I traced back to the website where I got the image which is from http://freebigpictures.com/butterfly-pictures/colorful-butterfly/ , but my tutor told me I have actually save both pictures in the same way so they both ended up with the same resolution of 72 DPI. So he said I should just save the image and download the other and so I did. When I printed out the two images I can tell the difference of the two that the 72 DPI is more blurry and the 300 dpi is clearer.

 

This is the 72 DPI image I saved.

 

This the 300 DPI image I downloaded.