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Image Resolution and Vector Files
September 11 2012
September 11 2012
Digital photographs contain a limited amount of information in the form of small squares called pixels. Whether the images come from a digital camera or are scanned from film, once they're in the digital world they can't be enlarged. There is no way to increase their resolution (meaning size), which is measured in pixels per square inch. The recent photograph above of my daughters and I in San Francisco's Chinatown, was taken with an older iPhone and you don't have to zoom in much to see the pixels in my wolf daughter's face. And while a larger version would be really nice (this one isn't big enough to fill the photo area), there is no way to add new pixels. Which means, among other things, that it's time for my husband to get a new iPhone.
It's true that CSI lab technicians and Angela on Bones will zoom in to a photo from an old security camera and sharpen up a small area in one corner to reveal a criminal's face reflected in the window of a parked car, and designers just shake their heads—not to mention crime lab technicians. If you try to increase the resolution of an image—especially one from a video—you get blur and lots of it. When you "enlarge" a photo or "add resolution" with image-editing software like Photoshop, the pixels are just cloned in all four directions (interpolated is the technical term). So every pixel is padded with identical pixels and you don't really add new data so much as you just spread the current data out. Which is why the photo gets more and more blurry.
Photographs used on web sites don't need to have ultra high resolution, as opposed to photographs used for brochures and magazines where bigger is always better. Usually for a website, images that are 1000 pixels on their longest side are big enough.
But there are other types of digital images that can be enlarged infinitely. The one we most often ask for, especially when we're dealing with logos, is a vector format image. Vector images are made with anchor points and lines rather than pixels so they can be enlarged and reduced with no loss at all.
They are mathematical shapes which are are much more editable than a photo. Pieces can be separated and moved around without any cutting or erasing. Colors can be swapped in several places at once and they are generally much less limiting than pixel-based images. But they also look more simple and two-dimensional than photos.
The most common type of vector file is an .ai (Adobe Illustrator file—our favorite choice when we're designing logos) but .pngs and .pdfs can also hold vector information. If you've had an .ai version of your logo lying around and you didn't know what to do with it, keep it around because all designers and printers in your future will be asking for it. And if you're having a logo created, make sure a vector version is included with your final files.
Learn more about vector images at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics
Archives
June 10, 2022
Common Questions about Migrating Your Website from 1.0 to 2.0
Your website on the retro 1.0 version of our platform will continue to function until at least June 2023, and after that we will keep the old platform working as long as is necessary/reasonable to ...
June 06, 2022
Upgrade Your Old Website to Prevent Lawsuits and Improve Marketing
Over the last few years, we have been working on the overly ambitious project of rebuilding our Website Builder and Content Management System based on modern coding standards, cutting edge design, ...
June 10, 2022
The New Gutensite Website is Live on Our New Platform!
Did you notice we just launched a new version of our website? Go to https://gutensite.com to see what's new. Look around and imagine how your business could be helped if we transformed your website ...
October 06, 2021
ADA Compliance and Website Accessibility Standards
In the last few months clients have had a growing paranoia about a growing number of ADA lawsuits (Americans with Disabilities Act) for website accessability. There have been reports of "serial ...
September , 2021
New IDX Widget Going Live for Everyone
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our system and also stay up to date with the changing technology requirements of each MLS, we have created an entirely new IDX Widget that was released to ...
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—Mike Tripp
CEO, S3 Integrity