WONKO'S IMAGE SIZING TUTORIAL

PIXEL (synonymous with Dots)

Most images (particularly, photo's and web pages) are made up of pixels of different colors. The arrangement of these dots make up what you see as the image. Most likely the period at the end of this sentence is made up of a single pixel. In fact, most of the images that you see are made up of small dots that blend together at a distance to form the picture.

Even photographs taken with your camera make pictures using this principle. They just take it to, or near the molecular level.

Many of the early impressionists would use this same concept to create pictures that made no sense close up, but from a distance were amazingly detailed and flowing images. Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte is a great example. To really get the feeling for this watch Ferris Buhler's Day Off. I know it sounds dumb, but aside from being a classic movie, it has a scene with this particular painting in which they step in gradually, right down to where you can see the actual canvas. Out of context, it really illustrates this point well.

To show you what I am talking about here, I have placed two copies of the same image below. On the left is the image as it is intended to be seen. On the right, it is blown up (through browser code only) to show the detail. I must reiterate, these are both calling up the SAME image file.

Note how, blown up, you can see each block of color separately. It actually becomes difficult to even see what the image is. When the image is reduced to proper size, the blocks all come together to create the windmill.

Again, each block that makes up these images is called a pixel. By counting the pixels wide and the pixels high, we come up with a measurement that tells us the amount of information in the picture. In this case the image is 36 pixels wide by 50 pixels high. Thus it would be called a 36 x 50 image.