help needed with a resolution problem

i am fairly new to photoshop, but not to design and so far i have been able to pick it up pretty well, except for a recurring problem i am having. i do some photography that i use in my designs, and when i use photoshop to open the photos to copy and move/paste them into my designs (or a larger, sort of main document), the picture pastes extremely small. i know this is a problem with resolution, but i am not sure how to fix it...originally i selected the photo image and went to "Image > Image Size" to set the resolution of the photograph to the same resolution as the main document i was trying to paste to (and i tried it the other way around too, changing the main document resolution) but the picture still pastes in a different size than the original. i have also noticed that sometimes i'll use "Image Size" to check the resolution and it will say, for example "100 pxls per inch," but the title bar of the document will say a different resolution, such as "file_Name @ 25% RBG." i think this might tie in somehow, but i'm not sure. any help that anyone could give would be greatly appreciated, as this is a very frustrating but basic problem. thank you in advance for your time.

-david

Well David,

I think you are mixing two things. First of all, there is the SIZE of the image. You express this size in different formats, but, as you probably know, on a computer you usually talk about pixels. So you might have a picture of 500x300 pixels. This means that the picture is 500 (very) little squares wide and 300 (very) little squares in height.

The other thing you are refering to is RESOLUTION. In photography, this is quite important. The resolution tells you how many pixels, dots, points (computer measurements) you have in a 'real world' measurement. Inch is the mostly used measurement in this perspective. DPI (often found on scanners, camera's ...) refers to 'Dots Per Inch' for example.

Now. When you take an image from the internet for example, the quality is mostly quite low. These internet-images have to be very light in order to be quicly downloaded and a screen only has a resolution of 72 DPI. So it has no use to make it a very qualitative image. But an image taken with a digital camera has quite a higher quality, let's say 300 DPI. This is because you might want to make a print of this picture, and a printer has more DPI than a screen.
Both images might have the same size (800x600 pixels for example) but because of their different resolution, the 'camera'-image is in fact much bigger than the 'internet'-image when you use them in the same image.

It all depends on what you are gonna use the image for. If you are gonna use the image on the internet, just make the high-quality image smaller. When you want to use it in printing, you might want to look for an other image that's much much bigger or of a better quality.

I'm not a wizard at these things, so I've tried to explain it in a way that I might understand myself If someone can correct anything, be my guest.

I think you pretty much covered it all.
Only thing I can add is that it may not be a good idea to try to change a 72 dpi image to ,say, 150 dpi. Because photoshop will have to "invent" dots to fill the blanks and you will end up with a somewhat blurry image.

and now a little tid bit from me

Im not very experienced in photoshop either, mostly just playing around with things.
Your problem could also be something very simple...
If you open up an image that is lets say 500X500 pixels, photoshop usually opens it so it will fit on the screen zoomed out, and you're viewing it at 67% or something. Because if you were viewing it at 100% it would be too big for the screen.

So if you paste something onto another image, make sure that the 2nd image isnt zoomed out. Because if you copy something that is at 100% into something that is 67% it will appear to be smaller.
That happened to me a few times until I realized that the thing I was pasting onto was zoomed out to 67%.

And maybe its something way more technical than that but I felt the need to add my two cents lol. Hope it makes some sense.

Yes, the little number at the top of the image, 25%, refers to the zoom level of the image. Zoom affects one thing and one thing only: how big the image appears on the screen. At 50% zoom, it is half the size in length and width. At 200% zoom, it is twice as big in length and width, so each image pixel is represented as 2 screen pixels.

Zooming does not change your image in any way, but it does affect how images will appear from different sources. If you drag an image into another image that is zoomed to 25%, the first image will appear smaller because it also shows up at 25%.

Image resolution is a different matter and has been covered well so far. Basically, the higher the resolution of an image, the more detailed it will print at a certain size; or, the higher the resolution, the smaller it will print with a certain number of pixels. A 4" by 5" picture at 300 DPI will print the same size as a 4x5 at 72 DPI, but the 72 DPI image will look like crap compared to the 300 DPI image. On the other hand, a 900x600 pixel image at 300 DPI will print at 3" by 2" while a 900x600 pixel image at 72 DPI will print at 12.5" by 8.33".

I hope this helps you figure out how to solve your problem.

thanks a lot for all the help guys, like i said i do some photography but the advice helped me understand how photoshop deals with images a little better. but of course, it was like the most duh problem ever, ~*~ had it figured out, it was just that photoshop had zoomed in on the image so it was really a lot bigger than it appeared on the screen, making the pasted photo size a lot smaller. i feel stupid, but it makes a lot of sense now, like i would wonder sometimes, why when i created a new image at a large size it would look so small in conjunction with other images i had opened..../feels stupid. but thanks a lot for all the help, you guys rock. now at least i know where to come if i have more problems .

-david

wooohoooooo 1 point for me!!

I actually felt stupid posting that because I know practically nothing compared to half of the other people here. And figured there was some big technical problem or something lol

yeah for me!

Glad I could help ya