Dumb Question Of The Day

[yobenny]

If my monitor can only see 72 ppi, then how can I know what I am editing on an image with 300 dpi?

Also does anyone use one of those pens to edit in adobe and what do you think about it?

[Brownbear]

I like your question about editing on a monitor with 72 ppi, and I'd like to know too...

[oleleclos]

Excellent question. What happens is that your computer scales your picture to your screen. Say you have a 2000x3000 pixel picture (6 MP) and you want to display the full picture on a 24" screen with a resolution of 72 ppi. Call that 1100x1400 pixels near as dammit to stay with nice, round numbers.

To display your picture which is 3000 pixels wide on a screen that is only 1400 pixels wide, your computer scales your picture down, basically throwing away about half your pixels (only on the screen, of course - they are still there in the image).

If you want to see more pixels, you'll have to zoom in, showing progressively more pixels but smaller parts of the picture. When you get to 1:1, you will see your picture original-pixel-for-original-pixel, but you'll only see a small part of it.

Hope this makes sense. Relativity can be difficult to explain.

For your last question, I used to (and still occasionally do) use a digitizer with a pen to work in Photoshop. A million times better than a mouse (never used the darn things), but since then the world has moved on and I am now using a "Magic Trackpad" with my Mac and Lightroom using just my fingers and finding it much more instinctive. The big difference is that the pen-based digitizer is absolute whereas the trackpad is relative, so you need a smaller surface to work on. Not sure if you can get trrack/touchpads for PCs, but if you can, try them. They should be cheaper than a digitizer, too.

Oh, one more thing: there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers (and I hope this is not one)

[Manfred M]

This seems to confuse a lot of people, but is actually really not relevant. Your image from your camera has a set number of horizontal and vertical pixels and except for the rare instances where you are viewing part of your image at exactly 100% anything you see will either be down-sampled to the size your are viewing it at or interpolated up if you are viewing at over 100%. I suspect that the 72ppi may be a hold over from the days when screens had lower resolutions than they do today.

My 27" monitor displays 1920 x 1200 and is about 23" wide and just under 14.5" high. 1920 / 23 = 83 ppi as is 1200 / 14.5 = 83 ppi (more or less, with rounding / measurement errors on my part). My equipment is not 72ppi when I run it at its native resolution.

[pnodrog]

Software that offers the option of showing an image or document actual size will have a setting where you enter a screens true ppi. The software then scales and displays the image at it's "true" size. If it is bigger than the screen or the window displaying it you will need to scroll the image or change the scale. Most of this software uses 72ppi as the default so actual size or screen scaling often ends up being incorrect.

[yobenny]

Thanks for the explanations, I "think" I understand this ppi thing.
In Adobe cs6 and the rest of them I reckon, you can certainly zoom in and look at individual pixels but when editing photographs that for me is rarely beneficial, because I can't see the entire image and in my experience amounts to a lot of backing up because changes done that close look so different from a whole image that I don't find it to be useful unless I want to remove some part of the image that cant be stamped over or blurred out.
So at 72ppi the song really remains the same doesn't it? You can't see the pixels in their entirety and adobe is just guessing and making decisions that you cant even look at until the image is at 100%.

On the pens and trackpad, neither of them look to me as if they included the features of the mouse buttons, which I rely on heavily when editing images. I was looking for more precise in my editing, a mouse (at least mine) is woefully too course and is difficult to do many tasks with.
The Mac trackpad does have windows 7 ability but looking at that thing I don't see how that is going to give me more precision in my selections. I am just wondering if I need to try and find a really good mouse.

[Donald]

Benny

I think folks have answered the first question - about image sizes etc.

As for the second - Mouse v Other tools (Tablet/Pen/Trackpad). I would say it's an absolute no-brainer. The worst device for doing what we are trying to do in terms of image editing is ............ the mouse. By a long, long way.

I use a Tablet. It does everything a mouse can do. But for total control and fine work, then it's no contest. I could not do photography without my Wacom tablet. Simple as that.

[yobenny]

which wacom should I buy, there are several options and I was surprised at how reasonably priced they are.
I might buy both products if I thought it would help me.

I recently bought my first DSLR but have been playing with Photoshop for 15 years or so.

Since I acquire and own information much better if gleaned from paper pages, I bought these books last week and they will be here today. If anyone has other suggestions I would appreciate those too.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/024...ls_o00_s00_i00

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/032...ls_o01_s00_i00

I guess I am going to go at this as I would my college courses years ago. Read, learn move on, until I build a body of knowledge that starts to help the results.

However I am not sure that this process will help me or anyone "think" like a photographer, or even if you CAN Learn that. That has a lot to do with interpretation and nothing to do with mechanical stuff.

[Donald]

which wacom should I buy,

Some people feel more comfortable with larger sized ones. Me - I find my little old Bamboo just perfect and does all that I'd ever want.

If you're into graphic design, I have no doubt that the top-end models are worth the money. But for everyday photographic editing, I think the Bamboo range offers all that you need.

As to which of the Bamboo range, if you elected to go for that, then I suppose that just comes down to how many features you want and what your budget is. There are, of course, other Tablet manufacturers, but I think Wacom is probably the widest known, if not the market leader.

[Manfred M]

Benny - I've been using a Wacom Intuos3 for years (they are up to Intuos5 now). I agree with Donald regarding working with a mouse, it is like trying to draw like a young child does, holding a crayon in his or whole fist and using their fist and arm to do the drawing, i.e. there is no motor control at all. Using a tablet pen is like drawing with a fat pen or pencil where fine finger motor control comes in.

As for size; I have a medium sized one. The smallest size does give me enough accuracy while the large one is tiring to use, but that's just the way I happen to work. You might be different.

[yobenny]

Well I went ahead and ordered the Bamboo Capture, I guess I will see, thanks for the advice!

[Brownbear]

Thank you for posting this Benny. I too, need to buy one of these so I can select things properly.

[Donald]

Well I went ahead and ordered the Bamboo Capture, I guess I will see, thanks for the advice!

You'll find that it takes a couple of days to get used to using it. You start of trying to use it like a mouse, but moving the cursor about the screen is different and, once you do get used to it, really easy and logical. When I first start using mine, I remember thinking, "This is really stupid. I'll never get used to it." Within 48 hours I was up and running.

[Manfred M]

My experience with a tablet was similar to Donald's, but I must be a faster learner as I was comfortable within a couple of hours... That being said as I look back, I don't know how I survived in the pre-tablet days.

[oleleclos]

What Donald and Manfred are describing is the fact that tablets are absolute devices. So to edit something in the middle of the screen, you work in the middle of the tablet; to edit something in the upper right hand corner you work in the upper right hand corner of the tablet and so on.

Mice (and trackpads) are relative devices meaning that you start where your cursor is and your movements work from there. To work in a particular area, you drag the cursor there and then work around that area. The absolute position of the mouse, or of your fingers on the trackpad, does not determine the position on the screen.

In many ways a tablet is quicker to work with once you get used to it because you don't have to move the cursor round all the time. Put the pen down in a place and the cursor jumps to that place. And I agree that you'll get used to a tablet soon enough, but using both tablet and trackpad, I have come to prefer the trackpad. Of course, a pressure sensitive pen on a tablet can do things like control the width of a brush or the opacity of a brushstroke which fingers can't do.

[yobenny]

Well It cant be as hard as my first computer - C:invalid entry..............

This stuff definitely isn't an easy breezy hop skip jump to good photographs.

I hope by the spring push of life I will have gotten a little better at this..........

[yobenny]

Just so Im sure I understand this, the larger your monitor, the more accurately it can represent an image in Adobe, correct?
Thats 1080p right?

[Manfred M]

Just so Im sure I understand this, the larger your monitor, the more accurately it can represent an image in Adobe, correct?
Thats 1080p right?

1080p = video format, not a still image (as in 720 x 1080p, one of the standard video HD modes. The other 1920 x 1080i).

No; monitor size has nothing to do with accurate representation, a larger monitor is a lot easier to work with because it has more screen real estate and gives you a better view of the image. My camera's native resolution is 4912 x 7360; I'm not aware of any monitor that can handle that size natively. Unless you are using a very old camera or a camera phone, most cameras will have resolutions well in excess of what a video card and screen can reproduce at 100%. Size is not the only measure you need to look for in a monitor; accurate colour rendition even more important.

In most of my work, I use a dual monitor setup in Photoshop, a 27" 30-bit high gamut monitor and a 24" 24-bit monitor where I leave my menus, tools, etc. Size is important for me when I do detail work in PP.