I’m a professional graphic designer. 4 years of college and 3 years of job experience have not been able to explain this.
Why is it that two images with the same pixel dimensions can be different resolutions? As I understand it, a pixel is one dot of color in a larger image, and resolution is a measurement of pixel density, so two images displayed at the same size with the same number of pixels should always be the same resolution.
I created an image for an email signature at about 1200 pixels wide. When implemented, the computer scaled it down to 299 pixels wide so it would fit, and it looked perfectly crisp and clear. This part makes sense to me.
To minimize the load time and storage for the image, I scaled it down to 299 pixels wide in Photoshop – exactly the same size it was in the signature – but it came out far lower resolution than it was on the email signature.
How can this be? This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this issue. In fact, I run into it so often that I normally avoid using pixels as a measurement for images entirely. I’ve googled it many times with no solid answer. I struggle to understand why we even bother measuring images in pixels if the measurement doesn’t mean anything.
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Are you considering the size of the image on your screen? Because a very small, low resolution image will look the same clarity as a large high resolution image.
There is also the effect of supper sampling, when scaling down a large image to a small one, you can take the average of many pixels to form one. This creates a very good anti-aliasing effect, making the image look much less jagged and clearer. This also removes the .jpg compression artifacts that appear on sharp edges such as in vectors. Check if you are storing the small version as .jpg or .png, .png will use slightly more space but it will leave artifacting out.
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