2 Resolution
In this section I will discuss resolution and how to work with it in Photoshop and Lightroom. Recently, I have observed that fewer people who work with images in Photoshop fully understand what resolution is and how to work with it. This has nothing to do with them personally, but rather that resolution is not discussed much these days now that some of our workflows have changed with an emphasis on social media or screen viewing versus print.
There was a time when photographers needed to know exactly what their image size was in order to dictate the size of a print, but now we can drag-and-drop photos into templates from print providers that automatically do the work for us. I still feel that resolution is very important for us to understand especially when creating composite images because often some images are collected from the internet and their resolutions may not match those of the cameras or scanners that we are using for our personal images. This is even more true with the arrival of Artificial Intelligence [AI] for image creation, because most of the current output is not set very high.
At the time of this writing one of the more popular AI generators is Midjourney that generates images with a max upscale resolution of 1024 x 1024 which is suitable for sharing images on-screen, but would only produce a relatively small prints based on the calculations described in this section. Images can be upscaled in Photoshop or third-party apps/plug-ins like Gigapixel AI from Topaz Labs or Resize AI from On 1.
Adobe has also entered AI image creation with their newly released web app Firefly. As with Midjourney and other AI options the resolutions for newly created images still have relatively low values, the exception with Firefly is that you can start with an image of your own and add AI pixels or make modifications using Generative FIll. This technology has recently been added to the current public Beta version of Photoshop [May 2023], so this amazing AI art generator can be applied directly within Photoshop to add pixels information to existing areas of an image, or can be used to increase the canvas..
Note: There will be parts of this section where the numbers referenced may become confusing, but you will have a much better understanding of how resolution works in our applications after reading it and will be able to make educated decisions on your own images.
What is Image Resolution?
Image Resolution is measured in pixels per inch [PPI] and refers to the number of pixels that are displayed per inch of an image.
The more pixels an image has per inch the greater its resolution will be which in turn results in a high-quality image. A high-resolution image will produce a higher quality printed image in terms of detail, and will simultaneously be allowed to be printed at larger sizes.
To assist in resolution comprehension, let’s break it down to the capture of a photo taken with a specific camera sensor. For this example, I will refe