Articles
What is a Digital Photo?
Pixels
Your digital photographs are made up of hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of tiny dots called Pixels. Your computer and printer can use these tiny pixels to display or print your photographs.
Image Size
The quality of your digital photograph depends greatly on the number of pixels used to create your image, this is often referred to as the resolution. The more pixels you have will create finer detail in your photograph and they add greatly to the overall sharpness too.
Resolution is the size of the digital image the camera produces, and is measured in megapixels. One megapixel is equivalent to 1 million pixels or dots of information. So a camera rated at 8.0 megapixels produces 8 million pixels or dots of information, that’s about 3264 pixels horizontally and 2448 pixels vertically. When you multiply the horizontal and vertical dimensions of an image you get the megapixel rating, in this case, around 8.0 MegaPixels.
There are other factors effecting your photographs though; the way in which the cameras computer assesses the information coming in through the lens, and the quality of the lens itself can make or break your pictures.
If you enlarge any digital photograph enough, eventually the individual pixels will begin to show as you can see above. This effect is called pixelization and is very like the grain seen in traditional film based prints. But the more pixels in your image, the more it can be enlarged before you see any pixelization.
The advantage of having a camera with a higher resolution is that you have a lot more ‘recorded information’ to work with, this is very important when getting digital prints made, and this higher resolution is very useful when you need to tightly crop an image while using photo manipulation software like Photoshop.