All right, now that we know how to get around inside Photoshop, let us take a closer look at the lay of the land. Exactly, what is it that we are getting around in the first place? To that and working a sort of examine the composition of a digital image of a file inside Photoshop.

What I want you to do is I want you to open up either using the open command or browse and bridge, whenever, an image called picturepuzzlelow.jpeg. It is a close cousin to this image that we already have open. It is actually a low resolution version of the same image, and I am going to open it using open recent. This command keeps track of the most recently opened images inside Photoshop. So, I have already opened this one. I will just bring it to front by choosing picturepuzzlelow.jpeg, and there it is.

Now note that this image fits inside the window. We can see everything inside this image and yet, we are looking at it at a 100%. So, we are seeing all the pixels. This is a very low-res version of the image. Only contains a fraction of the pixels in the high resolution image we were looking at before.

And just to demonstrate that, I am going to zoom in on it by Command Spacebar clicking on the queen here, several times, Ctrl Spacebar clicking on the PC, and notice as I click instead of seeing more and more detail, I am seeing bigger and bigger squares. And each one of these squares is a pixel. So an image, a digital image is actually a mosaique of colored squares. That is all that it is. It is just tons and tons of squares.

To figure out how many tons we are talking about, here is what I want you to do.

Go down to the bottom left hand corner of the image window, whether you are working on a Mac or the PC, that is where I want you to go. It may say something like open, it may say something different. It may say doc, colon, and some numbers. What I want you to do is press the Option key on the Mac where the Alt key on the PC and click this area. And what happens is you will see the number of pixels inside the image. That is 702 pixels wide by 475 pixels tall. That is a total of about 333,000 pixels. And then may sound like a lot, it met certainly is a lot in French Fries, but in pixels, it is not very much.

So while pixels maybe the core building block of an image, they are not necessarily the kind of things you want to see. Like when you see human being, you do not necessarily want to see their molecules. You know what I mean?

So, what do we do if we want to make this image look a lot smoother? How do we go about adding pixels to an image?

Well to do that, go up to the Image Menu, and choose the image size command. The Image Size Command is the primarily means by which you scale an image inside the Photoshop. In fact, if I had to choose the most important command, you know, borrowing like the open command and the safe command, and maybe even print, it would be the image size commands. It is a very core central command inside the software.

And now inside Photoshop CS2, it has a keyboard shortcut as well. Command Option I or Ctrl Alt I on the PC. And this is a keyboard shortcut that I have actually been lobbing for overtime. No body is been hearing me for years and years now. Then suddenly, they say “Oh! Oh yes, okay, we will do that”. So anyway, it happened. I do not know why, but some way, I got somebody’s ear and it finally happens. So, we now have a keyboard shortcut for image size.

I feel very proud. I must say eventhough I have nothing to do with it, except for bugging people.

Once you choose this command, you will see not only the width and height of the command in terms of pixels, but also the width and height of the command in terms of physical dimensions, printed dimensions in this case, inches.

So again, see that the width and height are 702 and 475 pixels respectively. We can see that that means that the image in memory completely uncompressed in memory, every single pixel accounted for is 325K, so not very big. You can create word files out of 300K if you work hard enough, but not so big where in fact images can get just holatious, s