digital painting zoom

[JParrilla]

Im sorry for the ongoing questions in this forum..
I feel like a beginner all over again.. but my recent use of photoshop has brought about many questions. Im curious about painting and zoom distances. Do you all normally paint at 100% zoom? Is 100% zoom the distance that the painting will be viewed at when saved? I noticed that when working large photoshop defaults your zoom to 30 or 60% If you paint from that distance... will the final product look different because it will be viewed at 100% and all the details up close will show.. for instance brush strokes and other things that are visible when looking closer?

[Baron Impossible]

100% zoom simply means displaying the image dimensions full size in relation to your monitor, full size being that a single point of colour on your image is represented by a single pixel on your screen.

If you then save for web then, unless you work unfeasibly small, or post unfeasibly large, you're going to reduce dimensions and therefore detail will be lost.

If you are talking about viewing printed output then it depends on your print size as well as your image size. Say your image is printined A4 then your printed image is likely to be much smaller than your canvas size (measured physically, side by side) but it will still retain a lot of the detail.

Not sure quite if that was what you're asking, but also if you paint a brushstroke at 20% zoom it's the same as painting it at 100%, even though you don't see the detail at the time.

So, if I'm to produce a 300PPI printed image at, say, 11x8", then the minimum resolution I can work at is 3300x2400. What I'd do is work at 4950x3600 to get the detail in, then resize to 3300x2400 for printing. Therefore the final print will retain much of the detail, but not quite pixel-for-pixel. And if you're talking comparative sizes then, depending on the dot resolution of your monitor, a 4950 width your canvas would be about 6' across if you could somehow display it all at once.

When painting I'll start with a small canvas, zoomed at 100%. When I've got the composition sketched in I'll increase the canvas to final print size and work at maybe 25%. Then I'll zoom to 50% - 100%, depending on the detail level, and maybe 200% for very detailed areas. It varies from person to person, of course, depending on their style and method.

[JParrilla]

ok i understand.. so lets use this website for instance. Lets say I do a painting and when Im done I save it to a JPEG.. which is what I always do when posting here. Will the image that I post be the image that I see when viewing in photoshop at 100% zoom?

[JJacks]

Yes it will.

[JParrilla]

ok gotcha.. So basically whether Im painting at 30% or 70% or whatever.. I should look at the image at 100% to know how its gonna look at the end? If thats the case wouldnt it be a bad idea to paint while further than 100%? because your not actually seeing what the it will look like at the end to you and the viewer?

[hippl5]

ok i understand.. so lets use this website for instance. Lets say I do a painting and when Im done I save it to a JPEG.. which is what I always do when posting here. Will the image that I post be the image that I see when viewing in photoshop at 100% zoom?

I still think that working larger is better because you'll be able to get details in more easily, plus you can always scale the image down so when you post it online it will looks like what you see at 60% or 30%

[Ilaekae]

Saving something at 100% and 300+ ppi for monitor display/posting on this forum is overkill and destroys loading times completely, pissing off a lot of people with slow web connections. You shouldn't be displaying at more than 96 ppi ON-LINE because the monitor can't go any finer. Keep the original for printing (same-size reproduction at 300 dpi in color is almost foolproof, though true black and white art should be as high a ppi as you can get it without blowing up the world.)

Pretend your art is made up of Legos. At monitor resolution of 96 "Legos per inch" at 100%, you can't "see" the Legos as separate elements. If you were to go to offset printing, you'd need a bit less than 300 Legos per inch to make sure your art looked good at 100%.

If your art is going to be blown up in size a good bit before offset printing, you'll need a hell of a lot more "Legos" stuffed into that sucker. (ie...you want it to repro at twice [200%] your original 100%, so you'll need to be working at 100% at around 600 ppi or "Legos per inch."

As for working "zooms," it all depends on what you're doing. An elephant filling an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet done completely at screen enlargements (zooms) of 800-1200% is gonna come out looking like Dick Cheney's mother. I often work that high, but it's only when I'm dealing with complex or very intricate patterns like areas of skin, lips, or buttons and shit. The entire figure should be done at much lower "zoom."

[Baron Impossible]

ok i understand.. so lets use this website for instance. Lets say I do a painting and when Im done I save it to a JPEG.. which is what I always do when posting here. Will the image that I post be the image that I see when viewing in photoshop at 100% zoom?

Hopefully not, as your JPG should be much smaller. If you view a typical "original" image at 100% you will see a part of it because it's too big to fit on-screen. When you post to the forums you resample down (resize smaller) to get it to the required size.

If you never intend to print, forget about PPI, DPI and any other PI. Pixel dimensions are all you need to worry about for the web. If you work on a piece at 4000x3000 pixels and you want to post it here then copy it, resample that copy to a sensible size - say 800x600px, and save as a compressed JPG.

Having written all that I'm still not sure what you're asking. Are you coming up against a problem, or having problems with detailing?

[JParrilla]

Hopefully not, as your JPG should be much smaller. If you view a typical "original" image at 100% you will see a part of it because it's too big to fit on-screen. When you post to the forums you resample down (resize smaller) to get it to the required size.

If you never intend to print, forget about PPI, DPI and any other PI. Pixel dimensions are all you need to worry about for the web. If you work on a piece at 4000x3000 pixels and you want to post it here then copy it, resample that copy to a sensible size - say 800x600px, and save as a compressed JPG.

Having written all that I'm still not sure what you're asking. Are you coming up against a problem, or having problems with detailing?


well the problem is that I always work the same size that Im going to post... which is usually 800x600. The problem is when I zoom to detail... you can see every damn brushstroke and pixelated crap. Also I always hear of people working large. And I wondered why I was creating documents at 800x600.. I think its because I was under the impression that I should work on the image at the same distance it will be viewed at.. because if I worked huge and posted a downsized version.. It would look different that what I saw while working. And about printing.. nope Im not printing anything.. yet :)

[Stahr]

ok, just an advice here.
if you use photoshop version cs3 or under you're going to get some digital artefacts when zooming in strange percentages, the ones that work is where you have divided it in half, so 50%, 25%, 12,5% etc is going to look good. (CS4 adds the function of antialasing by the openGL rendering, so you get a lot less artifacts in different zoom values than i talked about ).
Ok, so on with it...
to make things easy, you want to show an image in 800*600px on the web, just upsize it by 400% and you get 3200*2400px, if you want to see how it will look online just use a zoom factor of 25%.
then just resize a copy of 800*600 when you want to how it on the web, if you think it might be a little unsharp there is nothing wrong sharpening it a bit.

this was just an example, you can use whatever size you want and just work zoomed out to get a feeling of what it will look like online, you also get to be able to zoom in for details, and also print it at a nice size.

if you look at programs like painter, they got artefacts at all zoom increments unfortunately.

[m8y]

Window >> Arrange >> New Window for Mypic.psd

This will allow you to have a window open of the same document that updates after each stroke, allowing you to have it at viewing size on one and whatever detail/work size on the other.

In CS4 if you un-dock it from the top panel it will always be ontop or alternatively you and have it on second monitor.

[Qitsune]

100% zoom simply means displaying the image dimensions full size in relation to your monitor, full size being that a single point of colour on your image is represented by a single pixel on your screen.


Not true. 100% zoom means that each pixel in your image matches the size of each pixel of your display setting. You can try changing the resolution of your monitor and what will be 100% zoom will be different. It's not linked to the actual capacity of the monitor. If the monitor is set at 800x600, a 800x600px image will fill the screen when at 100% zoom, but not if you set your monitor and 1080x720 or something.