[julia]

well, im pretty new at this digital art thing. well, not completely new, ive been doing it for a while, but jsut sparsely.
now i was wondering, whenever i try and zoom in on something im trying to perfect, it gets extremely pixely pretty fast, and i just get frustrated with the end results.
i can zoom out and it looks alright, but im a perfectionist, and just knowing its not nearly as good as it could be close up, doesnt cut it.
so heres my question, what sort of "pixelation" or resolution, (or whatever it is i have to change), would u guys suggest starting out with. so that i can zoom in alot more and get the details just right.
in photoshop, id say im self taught, and i wouldnt know the names of these things. i dont know if i even would know how to change the settings. so if someone could help me out, that would be great. thanx! (PS 6 or 7)

[ September 23, 2002: Message edited by: julia ]

[Ian Jones]

Hi, here is omething I usually copy paste for questions like this.

Working Size:
Depending on the output of your final illustration, the size you should work at needs to be at least 150% larger than the intended final measurements. This means you will be able to shrink the image down when finished, effectively ironing out any minor mistakes and allowing you to work on smaller details because of your larger / zoomed in canvas. This is a common practice in traditional illustration where �finished art� is usually done at �half up� size.

Ok, so what you need to do is goto the image menu > image size. Then make your picture bigger. Add more pixels to it. The when you go to save a picture for display onscreen make a copy of it (so you dont destroy the original) and then resize this copy to the right size for display on the screen or web. This effectively increases the detail of your picture since you are reducing its size and cramming all the detail of the large pic into an even smaller size.

Hope that helps.

[eyewoo]

What Ian wrote... and to add to it... I'd ditto his suggestion to get familiar with the menu option IMAGE>IMAGE SIZE. Experiment with it and see how it works...

Also, in the EDIT>PREFERENCES>UNITS & RULERS option, set the rulers to pixels. In that way your sizes will be displayed as pixels.

The really simple answer is that if you want to be able to zoom in and still be able to make smooth lines, you need to start off with a large image pixelwise, i.e. 2 or 3 thousand pixels in width and height... and even better if you can handle 4 or 5 thousand pixels. A Photosdhop image is made up from a matrix of little square colors. The more of those little squares you can pack into an inch (PPI - pixels per inch) the smoother your lines are going to be as you zoom in.

But, keep in mind, when working with a bitmap program like Photoshop, the bottom line determination for how large you can work is very related to how much RAM you have in your computer. For what I believe you have in mind, you should probably have at least 1 gig of RAM... minimum. It is said, you can never be too skinny or have too much RAM.

[ September 23, 2002: Message edited by: eyewoo ]

[julia]

wicked, thanx guys, that was pretty much what i was looking for. cause what i hate the most is when i zoom in to do the eye or something, its just like some squares, and i cant get nearly enough in as i would like. but i think the thing with changing it to 4 or 5 thousand pixels will do it.
not sure what im at now. and also, i think my finished product, was always just zoomed at 100%. i guess if i just made it larger, and zoomed out more, the details would be alot smoother. (if that makes any sense.)
thanx!


[ September 23, 2002: Message edited by: julia ]

[B0b]

Photoshop image management is: take ur image say A4 300 Dpi CMYK = 24Mb now X 5 = 120Mb of Physical RAM needed by Photoshop b4 it starts using scratch, i have 768Mb of RAM allocated to Photoshop and a seperate 2Gb Scratch Partition and it flies