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Photoshop: Resolution

so resolution what the heck is it and what I want to set tio so here we got a picture and if you open that picture and photoshopped you could zoom up on it and if you were to zoom up on it you get it looking bigger on your screen bigger on your screen and eventually you've probably done this you zoom up and you'd start seeing what it's made out of and you start seeing that it's really made out of different colored squares right and if you zoomed up enough those squares can get huge well if you were to think about how large those hard there's a setting called resolution which means how big are those pixels but there's a little addition to that when you print them if you never print your image the resolution setting does not matter if you only display your image on screen is a slide show if you only showed on the internet you could have the resolution setting anything I could have it at ten thousand and it would look exactly the same as having it set to twelve because it means how big ar...

e these things when we print them so we're going to get it to somebody they're going to print it they're going to care what that setting nous but if they're not going to print it it doesn't men are so much so let's take a look att what does it really mean so if you zoom upon your image you got it you can see it's made out of pixels that's what these squares are you could look at one pixel and if you want to describe how big it isthe use throw ruler up there how big is it well this particular pixel would happen to be one sixteenth of an inch well the problem is he never see fractions in photo shop you don't you see two point six nine five you don't see a fraction so if you represent that same number one sixteenth of an inch where it's not a fraction instead it's a decimal it would be that well and you call the setting pixel size and it means how bigger the pixels when I print him and that's exactly what resolution is but that's not a friendly number point zero six to five so instead of thinking about the size of one pixel we simply count how many fit in an inch and it ends up coming out on friendlier number so if that was one sixteenth of an inch that means we fit how many of them in an inch sixteen that would be known a sixteen pixels per inch and that's the resolution it means you get sixteen pixels per inch when you print it's also noticed sixteen pp I now a lot of people will call this dp I it's very common for people to refer to a dp I that's not technically the right term the reason why it's not technically the right term is dots can either be on or off they can't vary in color brightness they could either be there or not so when you print you print with dots you have black ink in your printer it can either be there or not you have science and can your printer it can either be there or not those air dots but when it's on screen you have pixels pixels khun vary in brightness they can vary in color they can do all that kind of stuff they're not just on and off and therefore they're not dots but people call it dots per inch because that's what they were taught even though it wasn't the technically right term they mean well but it's just like people that say I have a I have a flat tire and in a new wheel it's like no you don't need a new wheel you need a new tire you're using the wrong term and if I take you literally you're going to get up new wheel but you'll still have a flat tire you know I mean it's just they mean well they're just got the term off a little so pixels per inch if you're talking about the resolution your picture uh in this case we have sixteen pixels branch so let's go back and think about our picture so you got a picture it's eight inches wide ten inches tall when you print I put her down it came out eight by ten and then there's a setting which tells you how many pixels are in each one of those inches are the pixels that big if so it's not gonna look very good that's probably that image somebody sent you from the internet you printed it out as a poster you know and it's looks terrible well that's because it has a certain number of pixels per inch which really defines how big they are or is it this or is it that we need to get him small enough where we can't see him my print so in this particular case it happens to be three hundred means there's three hundred pixels and each one of those inches that's all means and if you were to add up all of those you'd have three hundred times what eight inches it's simple math that would be the width of your image in pixels he'd do the same thing vertically all those I have three hundred and each inch you have a total of ten inches so three hundred times ten you'd see what you have all right so what number do we need well the number we need depends on how we're going to print our image because if we're going to print our image in the newspaper it's completely different technology then if you're going to put you in the china desktop printer for instance an inkjet reproduces shades of gray like this it just uses specs and it various how densely packed they are to make it look like it's darker it's long suspects are small enough that your eye can't focus on him it looks like you have different shades of grey but you really do have solid black and solid white paper print that in the newspaper instead and looks different you ever look close in a newspaper it's made out of circles because those tiny little specks he used on a nature would be too small to make it through a printing press so instead they make the circle's bigger and bigger as you get darker shades but it's a different kind of technology so it needs a different amount of information fed to it and these air the settings that I would give you generically so if you're going to print on any one of these particular choices these air the ranges that are safe if you go any higher than these ranges you will find that a your file sizes bigger than it needs to be sometimes radically bigger and be sharpening is less effective why because the pixels are so small it's hard to see it on the low end of this range if you go below that you might start seeing the pixels that make up your image in the image will look jaggi this really known as being pixelated so it's safest to be in this range so how do I choose should I go on the high side or the low side well if your image contains anything that is close to graphics think about a graphic graphic would be like a sign on the wall where you have pure black on pure white that's where you would notice the jag ease the most the closer your document contains things that look more like graphics where you have almost pure black and pure white the more you have to head towards the higher number if you have a picture of guitar strengths on a guitar those strings going to be very bright on the dark hole I don't know what you call that hole in a sound box or something of the guitar that's we're going to see the jag ease if you have a sailboat mast it's going to be really bright really bright highlight hitting it from the sun there's going to be dark sky next to it and if it's a little less bit off from being vertical you're going to see little jaggi is there if you have something buildings with their really sharp straight lines around all the windows you want to be closer to the higher range in here if on the other hand what you have is nature where there's no straight lines there's no crisp chris mega edges like that then you could go anywhere in this range you could get away with much lower so the closer you get to straight lines human man made stuff and closer to graphics there's a sign in your picture a stop sign or something you needed to look really crisp and all that the higher range of this would be better if it's nature trees and dirt and stuff you wouldn't notice as faras the range goes in the reason we're doing this is try to make it sort of file sizes are not excessive by going above these numbers and if you want above the numbers also sharpening would be less effective because the pics will be so small that it wouldn't show up when you print and if you go below these numbers here image might start looking pixelated jaggi and so that's what we use some nice little range is there now there's always reasons to deviate for this if you have a good reason to go for it but if you don't have a good reason this was what I would head and so the default in camera if I remember correctly at least in light room I believe it's to forty so if you look at two forty it's in the safe range frank yet right if you look at two forty it's in the safe range here for magazines you look at two forty it's in the safe range for hyeon brochures if you look at two forty it's just outside a newspaper safe range it's still worked fine so to forty is a pretty generic number that works for most things some people generically used three hundred that's like the old standard with your graphic designer and they just figured out they could get away with suddenly lower so the default became more like two forty questions there you know it's kind of mind bending well people are just loving it a lot of top guys out there say man we're having fights with our printers so thank you for clearing that up on dh there was the question about bit death yeah f l sunshine and mike bristol both wanted to know could you stitch in sixteen and then convert to eight that's what I mentioned yeah yeah once it's done stitching for most images you can bring it down to eight although if I had an extremely wide panorama that I was going to print the size of the wall that's behind me I would stay at sixteen just to be safe with larger you're going to print it the more of a tendency you're going to get to have the banding in it so as I'm going to go larger and larger with them just to be safe I might end up with staying at sixteen just so I have more shades than I might need to just make sure that there's not gonna be an issue with that if I'm going to print it small eight and a half by eleven you know thirteen by nineteen kind of sizes of just about anything would be fine at eight bit so meaning you could convert to eat after yeah about pro photo when were for your own personal workflow using it you use it for some images ok it's only going to matter if I have extreme colors so if I'm in camera and I see a colorful spike on the end that's the only time I need to think about it if there's not a colorful spike on the end and I'm in s rgb I'm fine if there is a colorful spike I might think hey adobe rgb might prevent that spike but if there's not a colorful spike you don't have an image that where it would matter great thank you so some websites when you submit photos to him they have size restrictions megapixels or you know people die how does this affect the size of the photo and can you get away with dumbing it down if it if you don't think it's going to get a print or if you don't care if it's going to be printed it depends on how you apply this for now the way ofthe described it is more or less you type this number into camera and remember that dialogue box where we had the settings this is where you would specify it uh in what it does is it doesn't change the amount of information that's in your file all it's saying is when you hit the print button how much space should this picture take up should it take up this wall or should it take up the street of paper me how how big are the pixels but I can think about then do I have enough information in the image to be printed this big or not so let's look at that here I have an image I don't know what the resolution of it was because I wasn't paying attention to it when I opened it I'll go to the image menu and I'll choose image size that's where I can find out in here it tells me the resolution right there in all its doing when it puts the within inches is it's taking these numbers which is the amount of information camera gave it this is the amount of information the camera I was using captures uh and it just divided this number by three hundred whatever the answer is is sitting right here it took this number here divided by three hundred whatever the answer is is right there that's all it's doing but there's two different ways I can change the number after I opened the image in that has to do with this check box right here if re sample is turned off it means don't change the total amount of information we have leave the width and height in pixels the actual number of squares that make up my image leave it consistent just change how big they are when you print them and so the lower the number I put in here the fewer pixels fit in an inch and therefore they have to be bigger in order to fill that inch uh is going to make the entire picture get bigger so watch one out so I'll take this from three hundred I'm going to bring down a two forty watch the width and height in inches it just went up because it just re calculated it took this number which has not changed and divided by two forty and told us how big would it be if I continue to bring this down it now tells me it's even gonna print bigger because this is simply how big are the pixels that we have when we print if I say one pixel per inch we're going to have this many inches and this many inches to see that s o is doing it that's if I have re sample turned off the time I use that is when the setting attached my picture was different than what I needed somebody gave me a picture and it came in with this number in so I went to image size and I'm like seventy two cheese for printing that's really low because remember those numbers we had up there were more up in the two or three hundreds song like dang that's way too low for the kind of pretty and you do so if I just want to figure out how big with this image be with the setting I need I turn off free sample because I don't want to change the amount of information that's in my file you just type in what I need let's just say it was two forty then I can have that picture that somebody else gave me that had a weird sitting in there and I say oh that's ah about a twelve by twenty image that's so big I could print it now if after doing that that's not big enough if that's not big enough then I can turn on re sample re sample means change the amount of information we have scale my picture by changing the actual pixels that make it up to add more pixels or throwaway pixels and let me type in a new number so now I'm going to say let's make this thirty inches in with gonna beat darn near three times the original and it re calculates this number up here and we're going much higher look at that that went much higher and it tells me up here that this file used to be thirty six meg's when it first opened it but now I'm telling it to give me much more information than I originally had it's going to be two hundred fifty two megabytes because I'm changing the number of pixels the image is made out of and that's what re sample means is change the number of pixels image may not add some or takes him away and so the main time I use that is when I don't have enough or I have too much to begin with so what I would do is first here's what do you do you go to image size just see what you got if the number for resolution is not what you need turn off free sample in type in what you need and all that means is using what I already have how big would this image be at the resolution I need then after looking at those you might say well dang I need a printed pig earn that so you turn on a re sample and then you type in what you truly needed I needed a fifteen inches and it's going to now add information to the file by scaling it up and adding mohr pixels to the image in any time it does that anytime it's adding information the image will look softer but if I choose on do you see this gat bigger on screen and if I zoom up on this object a hundred percent view there's more information but she's undo it's changing the amount of information it's getting bigger or smaller so but that's how I think about it I turned re sample off if the settings wrong I need something else and then I look at the width and height in inches and say is that what I needed where is this too much information or not enough and if it's too much or not enough turn on re sample everybody always takes a while to get resolution if it's new to you by chance watched this video over about six times and you'll start getting that but the first time it's it's usually a little mind numbing um but then there's two places where we can change the width and height of our picture we were just in one it was called image size there's another one called canvas size and let me show you the difference here's a picture and I made a photo shop document where I tried to make it look as if it's printed on campus I didn't put the texture and I probably should have done that but now let's look at the difference between image size campus eyes so if we go to the image size dialog box it's the equivalent to doing this make your picture bigger or make your picture smaller and therefore you will need a different size piece of canvas to printed on because you're telling it your printer will get get a print it bigger or your printer is going to print it smaller and therefore you should use a different piece of canvas to print it on make it appropriately sized but then the one called canvas size is different imagine left picture itself alone but you adjusted on ly the canvas well then you'd have more canvas than you need so the picture wouldn't fill the whole thing right if he had a bigger canvas in the picture or if you made a smaller canvas but you didn't change the picture it would crop into your picture and if you did not change in the size it would just cut some of it off right so if you got a canvas size what you're saying is leave the picture itself the dimensions it used to be but take the document that contains the picture and make it bigger if so it's gonna have put something in there it's usually gonna put white in there and if you tell it to make the document smaller but leave the picture the same size it's going to crop off some of it and that's what can this size will do so where is just a normal picture we'll take these guys these air some russian street street dwellers can say ah and they're overly embarrass that they're such things since this didn't used to happen so if you're there trying to take pictures they're all sleeping but your guide or whoever is with you will be overly embarrassed I'm like here where you're just like yeah they're always so canvass eyes if I end up coming in here it tells me the width and height of the picture I'm gonna type in a higher number twenty in twelve and click okay you see how just added space but it's empty space to make my document bigger leave my picture the same so I got a bigger document pictures still taking up the same amount of space within it choose undo war I could get a canvas size and if I reduced the number don't want six by six well my picture is not going to change in size but finally you're going to use six by six inch document to contain it is goingto cut off some of that stuff did warn me you're going to cut off some stuff and you see how it cut it off so canvas size is thinking about the document leaving the picture alone just the document contains it should get bigger she getting smaller image size means both document and the picture together bigger smaller so the time that I use canvas size is usually when I want to add some space to the document um or is somebody gives me an exact proportion I need or something I could type it in and have it cut it off or not then this thing down here is where should the original picture be within that new canvas and this little dot means it be centered if I put it here it would be in the upper left corner of the new document that's blogger of smaller here it would be in the lower left corner and then down here background extension color means I'm going to add space what color should fill it defaults to your background color but you could tell it's something else so in its size and canvas size but remember your resolution that's what you want to type in and when you were changing that canvas size and then you would put a color and it would be like if you want bread or border yep put a board around or you want to put a text that maybe title or whatever title or a caption or you wantto were sometimes I'll do this I'll have I need to put three pictures together I want to put one of these lines together with one of these uh with these things here so I'll open this one first I'll say canvas size put this picture at the top of the new campus and let's make the height percentage two hundred percent so it's going twice as tall as you used to be and that this picture is going to the top of the new document zoom out now I have space for the other picture so go back to bridge I'll open the other image that I wanted open image uh I mean a copy and paste if I go up here copy will be great outside doesn't know what part of the image to copy but if you select all it'll know that now you want all of it I'll close this file some back into this one which was right behind it and then if I choose paste it'll be in here it always centers it so the move tool we'll talk about that later when we talk about layers you could move it down to the bottom but it makes sense that made space forthe and sometimes I'll make space also to the right of it so I got for you know up that kind of thing we've talked about the settings of your finding cameron we've talked about some of the settings that will be just your image is made out of so if we go to photo shop and we create a brand new document you'll see some of those settings in there so here we go with in height we can use either pixels or some other measurement system let's say we want inches and I have a sheep paper for my printer that's an eight by ten sewing type eight by ten inches I look on that chart that I gave you of the resolutions and I see arrange for my kind of printer ink jet in I think of higher low based on the content that have lines that are gonna be near graphics if so I go to the high side that kind of stuff but let's just type in the low side uh color mode here we have these choices lab mode is something we'll talk about on the second siri's ofthree class three day classes it can be useful but it would be rare for me to create a brand new document in it it's rare to use it at all but it has some cool stuff seemed like a is on ly for printing press if this is not going to be printed on a commercial printing press were pretty intense of thousands of copies you don't need that rgb is what you use for pretty much every color image grayscale just means you want black and white bit map means solid black and solid white no shades of gray that would be like some text that has no shades at all on the edge so mainly you use are to be look we gotta setting here eight sixteen you can even go to something higher but for most images eight's fine if I ever noticed banding in something I d'oh you know where it's got stair stepping where should look smooth that's the time to bump up and then down here color space this is how vivid colors can we make and for most people adobe rgb is pretty good and this is only for video people the pixels that make up our image should they be square or not and it's video people that work with rectangular one so otherwise don't deal with that so anyway when you're in a new document you guys getting some feeling for most of the settings and they're in most of the time it's simply width and height in inches out a resolution and then the settings you usually use dobie rgb in a pit you're good