Pixels

Pixel

Image quality: Image quality is one of those concepts that is greater than the sum of its parts. But you can’t ignore the parts if your goal is to produce images of the highest quality. Every image quality factor counts.

This page introduces the key image quality factors, describes how Minarets™ measures them, and explains what, if anything, can be done to improve them. It is a guide to Minarets organized by image quality factor. Additional information can be found under Tour (organized by module) and Minarets Documentation.

To illustrate the quality factors, we use this early morning image of Monument Valley from Hunt’s Mesa, near the Arizona-Utah border. A 13x19 print (available for purchase) is breath-taking, though it can’t capture the experience of grabbing the camera gear and running for the truck as the storm broke. Hunt’s Mesa isn’t public land; you need a Navajo guide to get there. Tom Phillips does an excellent job.

Picture Resolution: Resolution refers to the number of pixels in an image. Resolution is sometimes identified by the width and height of the image as well as the total number of pixels in the image. For example, an image that is 2048 pixels wide and 1536 pixels high (2048 X 1536) contains (multiply) 3,145,728 pixels (or 3.1 Megapixels).  You could call it a 2048 X 1536 or a 3.1 Megapixel image.  As the megapixels in the pickup device in your camera increase so does the possible maximum size image you can produce.  This means that a 5 megapixel camera is capable of capturing a larger image than a 3 megapixel camera.

color depth	Number of displayed colors	Bytes of storage per pixel	Common name for color depth
4-bit	16	0.5	Standard VGA
8-bit	256	1.0	256-Color mode
16-bit	65,536	2.0	High Color
24-bit	16,777,216	3.0	True Color

Pixel Intensity: Each pixel of the screen image is displayed on a monitor using a combination of three different color signals: red, green and blue. This is similar (but by no means identical) to how images are displayed on a television set. Each pixel's appearance is controlled by the intensity of these three beams of light. When all are set to the highest level the result is white; when all are set to zero the