I've been asked about pixels, inches, and dpi a lot lately so I came up with a little analogy to help people understand.  When a photograph is opened and you go to image size, you find out the image has a certain size in inches, and a dpi setting, but what does it all mean?

Put simply, pixels are peanut butter spread.  How much peanut butter you have is like how many pixels you have.  The photograph has an attribute to it for inches and dpi, but all that says is how big a piece of toast you're going to spread the peanut butter on.  The dpi is like how thick it goes on.

If you have only a little bit of peanut butter and you try to spread it on a big piece of toast it won't be good.  Basically, it's always good to work on the full size versions of photos because otherwise, it's like throwing away peanut butter.  Now if you up size an image, it's like adding in a filler.  But like imitation peanut butter filler.  A little won't be noticed, but if you use too much, it won't taste like peanut butter anymore.  Same with an image.  Too much upsizing and it won't look good.  Also jpeg artifacts could be more problematic, especially if you didn't save the image at full quality.

What does all of that boil down to.  Focus on how many pixels you have in the image.  Most photographs are 300 dpi (pixels per inch).  so if you have an image that is 9000 pixels wide, then you can print it 30" wide without having a crappy looking image.  Don't worry about the inches and the dpi listed in photoshop.  That only matters when you try to print directly inside photoshop.  If you use anything else to print, only the amount of pixels will matter.

And that is how pixels are peanut butter

 

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