The Secret Life of Pixels

Everything you always wanted to know about pixels!

From TV to Cinema, Virtual Reality and Smart Devices, pixels are everywhere. With the proliferation of screens in recent years, pixels are the unsung heroes of our daily visual experiences. But for visual artists working in Game or Visual Effects, pixels are the foundation of everything.

ORIGIN

Pixel is the the short form for ‘picture element’. Pixels are the smallest entity of digital images, from capture (camera sensors) to display (screens and projections).

While the the concept of a “picture element” dates to the earliest days of analogue television, it is fair to give credits to ancient civilizations who invented the art of mosaic where small stones of different colours used to represent a scene or a character. Our modern days pixels are no more than a digital version of theses mosaics.

RESOLUTION

The number of pixels – or pixel count – determines the resolution of a computer monitor or TV screen, and generally the more pixels, the clearer and sharper the image.

The number of pixels is calculated by multiplying the horizontal and vertical pixel measurements. For example, HD has 1,920 horizontal pixels and 1,080 vertical pixels, which totals 2,073,600. It’s normally shown as 1920 x 1080 A 4K video resolution, for example, has four times more pixels than full high definition (HD), and 8K has 16 times more pixels than HD.

COLOURS

The specific color information that a pixel describes is made of three components of the color spectrum, Red / Green / Blue or RGB. The variation of intensity across these 3 components will determine the actual colour displayed.

The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel depends on the number of bits per pixel (bpp). A 1 bpp image uses 1 bit for each pixel, so each pixel can be either on or off. Each additional bit doubles the number of colors available, so a 2 bpp image can have 4 colors, and a 3 bpp image can have 8 colors:

• 1 bpp, 2¹ = 2 colors (Monochrome)
• 2 bpp, 2² = 4 colors
• 3 bpp, 2³ = 8 colors
• 4 bpp, 2⁴ = 16 colors
• 8 bpp, 2⁸ = 256 colors
• 16 bpp, 2¹⁶ = 65,536 colors (“Highcolor” )
• 24 bpp, 2²⁴ = 16,777,216 colors (“Truecolor”)

BECOME A PIXEL EXPERT

The unrivaled experts of pixels in Visual Effects are the Compositors. Their mission consists in seamlessly combining images of different nature and origin in order to create a believable and photo-realistic scene.

Explore and join the VFX courses at Escape Studios today!