Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Understanding Pixel Size

Notice that I said “every photograph,” not every image. Some features in Photoshop are not made out of pixels. Those include paths, shape layers, and type layers, which print out with crisp edges regardless of the resolution setting of the document.

Every photograph you ever see in Photoshop is made out of a grid of different-colored squares that are known as pixels. So, imagine that you printed a photograph and then zoomed in on it with a microscope. Once you start to see the individual pixels, you can start to think about how large they are. If you slid a ruler under that microscope, you could measure the size of an individual ...