← Afterglow

Workshop · Night 4

Pixel Peeper

Same shape, drawn two ways. Zoom in and watch one of them fall apart. That's the whole difference between a photo and a logo, and the exam asks you to know which is which.

Rastera grid of colored squares

Vectormath that describes a shape

At 4× the raster is starting to show its squares. The vector is the same shape it always was, because it isn't made of squares. It's made of instructions: "a circle here, this big."

How big does it print

ppi is not a size

1080 pixels is 1080 pixels. The ppi number only decides how many of them get packed into an inch when you print. On a screen it changes nothing.

Why 72 and 300

72 is the old screen default. 300 is what a print shop wants. Same pixels, different instruction on how tightly to lay them down.

You can't zoom your way to more pixels

Making a raster bigger invents pixels that weren't there. Photoshop guesses. It's called resampling, and it always costs you something.

Which is which

Photos, paintings, scans: raster. Logos, type, icons, anything that has to print at any size: vector. Photoshop does both. It's better at the first one.