Photoshop® Elements 8 For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Working with Resolutions, Color Modes, and File Formats

In This Chapter

• Understanding and changing resolution

• Resampling images

• Understanding color modes

• Working with file formats

When you open a picture in Photoshop Elements, you're looking at a huge mass of pixels. These pixels are tiny, colored squares, and the number of pixels in a picture determines the picture's resolution. This relationship between pixels and resolution, which is important for you to understand in all your Elements work, relates to creating selections (as we explain in Chapter 7), printing files (Chapter 14), and sharing files (Chapter 16).

Color modes are also represented as collections of pixels. Color modes are important when you're using tools, and printing and sharing files.

This chapter explains some essential points about resolution, color modes, and the file formats you use to save your Elements images. We talk about changing resolution by resizing images, converting color modes, and saving the results in different file formats.

The Ubiquitous Pixels

Files you open in Elements are composed of millions of tiny, square pixels. Each pixel has one, and only one, color value. The arrangement of the pixels of different shades and colors creates an illusion to your eyes when you're viewing an image onscreen. For example, you may have black and white pixels arranged in an order that creates the impression ...