Pixelating – Playing around with your Picture Pixels in Photoshop
Pixels are responsible for the fun, creative images created on your computer, television and digital camera. Surely you’ve noticed the advertisements for mega-pixel camera and have read about pixels just about any time you are looking at anything that is Photoshop related. They are a major part of Photoshop and understanding a little about them can help you.
Pixels are the basic unit of composition of digital images. They play a major role in your digital photos and they are often responsible for some of the problems you may have with them. Sometimes there are unwanted fringe pixels on the edges of your photos after you are done fixing them up. They can make your photo appear blurry or fuzzy. To remove them you need to go to “Filter>Maximum”. Change the radius to one pixel and that should get rid of the fringe. If you think you’ve removed too much, cancel the action. If not, click “OK”.
You can pick parts of images and later them in Photoshop by using channels and masks to store selections. Using partially selected or feathered pixels in an image allows you to create near perfect photos. The Marquee, Magic Wand and Lasso tools are used as the three main players in the Photoshop selection process. Choosing one of these tools allows you to bookmark the boundary of the selection on the image. Quick Mask mode let’s you edit selections using painting tools. Gray scale images are made with Quick Mask. The individual pixels have RGB values from 0-255. You use black to mask and white to remove mask. You can also use shades of gray to paint with. This will make partially selected pixels. Partially selected pixels have a slightly opaque mask and are slightly changed by editing. While you cannot partially edit half of a pixel, editing can have different degrees of editing.
Partially selected pixels can be feathered. When you feather selections partially, selected pixels can be made. Feathering that bonds the surrounding pixels with a selection creates a transitional boundary. When this occurs the mask will be blurred or have soft edges. Putting percentages of pixel color on both sides of the selection border will create a transition.
Photoshop selection boundary has been called marching ants because of the way that it moves. If this so-called marching ant border is displayed as a selection boundary for a mask, one line will not properly separate the partially selected areas. Photoshop uses 50% for selected pixels. If the pixels are selected less than 50% they will be outside of the selection border. Those that are 50% or more will be within the selection border. With that said, don’t think that the pixels outside of the selection border are not selected because they are. But they will not be displayed as such.
If you are one of the many Apple lovers, you may run into non-square pixels. Non-square pixels are present in Photoshop CS. They may be blurry because they are a different shape. Hit the Shift-Command3 keys or Shift-Command4 and open the PDF screen capture file. Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction needs to be shut down. If you are using Photoshop 7 or an earlier version of the software, don’t bother. You will not be able to adjust the Pixel Aspect Ratio Correction.
If you are trying to set the ruler info to pixels, you have to click on the preferences submenu in the Info tab and change the ruler to pixels. A quick way to pick a particular selection is to click on the Rectangle in the custom shape tool and pick the width and height you want in pixels.
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