The Five Pixels You Meet in Heaven

I remember the first time I opened Photoshop. So does anyone within fifty feet of my college dorm, that weekend. It seemed like the tools were made for computer people, not photographers. I was confused, angry, then confused again.

Over time, I got used to everything (almost) and can now count myself as a decent to above-average user of the software. But it was only after my years of working with the little devil that I had an epiphany about the basic structure of Photoshop.

I had finally gotten to the level of programming filters, when I was shocked by the relatively small number of variable definitions. I thought there had to be dozens, hundreds, even. But the things that could be changed in a single pixel were actually quite finite and understandable.

I am already asking people much smarter than myself for other variables, but here are the top five “things” you can change about a pixel in Photoshop, GIMP, or any other image manipulation software.

The Hue represents a color’s nature. Visually, it is the color’s position along the color wheel. It is that certain “something” that makes us identify the color as “red”, but not “green”.

Saturation is the amount of gray mixed into the Hue. For painter’s, this is equivalent to making shades of base colors. There are 256 gray values, from absolutely no gray (255) to nothing but gray (0). The numbers move counter-intuitively, like the f-stops on a camera.

Brightness, by comparison, is the amount of white mixed into a given hue. It is like a painter making tints of a base color, and is also represented on a 256 point scale. Good news! This one makes sense. 0 is low, while 255 is all high.

Using rotate, crop, or any other number of tools, you can change the actual location of a pixel, relative to its position before you clicked the mouse. Changes in the size of the image are also included in this category, since such changes also affect the final location of the pixel, relative to where it used to be.

No...it just means “State of Being”.

The pixel can have any one or a combination of six different states of being, based on three Yes/No choices.

• The pixel can exist or not exist. When you crop, what is deleted has had it existence state changed.

• The pixel can be selected or not selected. When you perform an action on an entire image, all the pixels are considered “selected”.

• The pixel can be visible, or not visible, based on the blending mode and visibility assigned to its layer.

Sort of.

There are a number of things you can do to each of these characteristics and, when you combine doing something to more than one of the characteristics at a time, this is where you get the seemingly limitless possibilities of post-processing.

But for the new player in the game, as well as for the veteran who wants to explore some tool or menu item they have been ignoring up to now, the easiest way to come to an understanding of the potential of any single move is ask yourself what basic characteristics of the pixel are being affected by the new move...and how.