From the course: Inkjet Printing for Photographers

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Understanding pixels, printer dots, and resolution

Understanding pixels, printer dots, and resolution - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Inkjet Printing for Photographers

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Understanding pixels, printer dots, and resolution

A digital image is made up of a bunch of colored picture elements, or pixels. Line these colored pixels up in a grid, stand far enough away from them, and you've got what appears to be a continuous-tone image. It's really just like making a picture by using colored pencils to fill in squares on a piece of graph paper. The difference is that your typical digital image has millions of squares and each square can be any one of millions and millions of colors. Each of those millions and millions of colors has a number associated with it. So to store an image, all your camera has to do is decide what color each pixel should be and then sock away the appropriate numbers. Change the number for a particular pixel and you change its color. Now as we talked about earlier, an inkjet printer works by spraying colored dots at a page. However, your printer might only have, say, eight different ink colors available. So a single dot of ink can only be one of eight different colors. A pixel in your…

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