Digital Photography – What are pixels?

Once upon a time works of art were created with pigments, paints, inks, and dyes. Real tangible things in a real tangible world. But as we move towards the digital world, the common material in works of art is changing to a digital form… the pixel. Whether your digital creations are photographs, Photoshop creations, or Illustrator illustrations, any digital artwork is made up of pixels. But what are they really?

The word pixel is actually short for picture element. So, in a very literal sense, a pixel is one of the many minute details or elements that make up the whole image. Every photograph or piece of digital art is made up of pixels. They are the smallest unit of information that makes up an image. The more pixels in an image, the larger and more detailed the artwork will be.

The number of pixels used to create an image is often called the “resolution.” The best digital cameras have the most pixels because they produce a higher quality image. Because if you remember, the more pixels you have available, the more beautiful and detailed your image can be.

In color images, a pixel is typically made up of three color components known as RGB (red, green, blue) or dots of four colors, known as CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black). Most forms of digital art are saved as RGB, since that’s how screens are programmed to read colors and project light. But most professional printers will use the CMYK format because your standard printer is set up to print with CMYK pigments.

Regardless of whether you are using RGB or CMYK, when these color points converge, they create colored pixels. So if you have red and blue pixels resting close to each other, you’ll likely see a purple hue in the larger image.

These days we often focus on megapixels rather than the idea of ​​individual pixels. A megapixel (MP) is 1,000,000 pixels. In addition to its reference to the number of pixels in an image, it also expresses the number of image sensor elements in digital cameras or the number of display elements in digital screens. For example, a camera that creates a 2048 × 1536 pixel image typically uses a few extra rows and columns of sensor elements and is commonly said to be 3.2 megapixels or 3.4 megapixels.

In most digital cameras, the sensor array is covered in a patterned color filter tile that contains the red, green, and blue we discussed earlier. This configuration allows each sensing element to record the intensity of a single primary color of light. The camera interpolates the color information from neighboring sensor elements, through a process called demo, to create the final image. These sensing elements are often referred to as “pixels”, even though they only record 1 channel (only red, green, or blue) of the final color image.

It’s also important to note that a camera with a full-frame image sensor and a camera with an APS-C image sensor may have the same number of pixels, but the full-frame camera may have better dynamic range, less noise and better low-light shooting performance than an APS-C camera. This is because the full-frame camera has a larger image sensor than the APS-C camera, so more information can be captured per pixel. A full-frame camera shooting at 36-megapixels has roughly the same pixel size as an APS-C camera shooting at 16-megapixels.

So while a pixel itself may be very small, without them we couldn’t make the whole. Each pixel helps bring detail and life to an image. The more pixels you have, the more detailed the artwork you can create.