I came up with a way for designers, digital artists, photographers, videographers, etc. to explain the concept of "resolution" and "pixels" to laymen. It goes like this:
You take a photo, but once you press that button on the camera, you are magically teleported to a press box at a football stadium. The stadium is completely empty except for your photo, which is sitting ON the football field. It's huge, the size of the field, just standing there where you can see it head on from the press box. You can leave the press box and go down to the field and walk up to your photo and actually touch it, but you notice that it's really a big wall of Legos. It's a bunch of different colored Legos stacked up and arranged in such a way that it looks like your photo from the press box. Each Lego is a "pixel." Now imagine an eighteen wheeler with a flatbed trailer waiting just outside the stadium. It has "EMAIL" printed on the side. You want to email this photo to a friend, but the "resolution" is too big. There is no way this Lego wall is small enough to fit on the trailer. So you can remove legos (you cannot add any) to make the resolution smaller, but you have to leave enough legos so that the wall still looks like your photo. Now when you go back to the press box, you will still see your photo, only it will be smaller. Maybe it's only the size of a billboard you would see on the highway. But it's small enough to fit on the email trailer now. Your only option for making the wall bigger (so that you could lay it down in the desert and see it from space) is to replace each lego with a colored refrigerator box. The "resolution" will not be better, because you still have the same number and colors of boxes that you did Lego blocks.
I think this is a fun and tangible way to explain these concepts to a layman who doesn't work in the digital imaging world. I'm sure there are all sorts of other analogies to explain even further, but I think this works well for an introductory concept. I'm looking for a similar way to explain how "cropping" and "resizing" and "scaling" aren't the same thing and they affect "dimensions" and "proportions" differently. I thought something with a big wad of Silly Putty might do the trick (copy your image onto the silly putty and then stretch it to "resize" it or use a knife to "crop" it.) but I run into the problem of "resizing" versus "scaling." I've had many, many, many times where I'm asked (as a graphic designer) to take an image and resize it, only the customer wants a vastly different proportion for the final product (and 8x10 turned into a 11x17 for example). They want all of their image to show up, but also to fill up the 11x17, with no blank spaces and nothing cropped out of their 8x10. This means that I usually have to use Photoshop to clone some of the photo to fill up the negative space for the 11x17.
I'd like to have a simple, kindergarten way to explain how this works. Any suggestions?
You take a photo, but once you press that button on the camera, you are magically teleported to a press box at a football stadium. The stadium is completely empty except for your photo, which is sitting ON the football field. It's huge, the size of the field, just standing there where you can see it head on from the press box. You can leave the press box and go down to the field and walk up to your photo and actually touch it, but you notice that it's really a big wall of Legos. It's a bunch of different colored Legos stacked up and arranged in such a way that it looks like your photo from the press box. Each Lego is a "pixel." Now imagine an eighteen wheeler with a flatbed trailer waiting just outside the stadium. It has "EMAIL" printed on the side. You want to email this photo to a friend, but the "resolution" is too big. There is no way this Lego wall is small enough to fit on the trailer. So you can remove legos (you cannot add any) to make the resolution smaller, but you have to leave enough legos so that the wall still looks like your photo. Now when you go back to the press box, you will still see your photo, only it will be smaller. Maybe it's only the size of a billboard you would see on the highway. But it's small enough to fit on the email trailer now. Your only option for making the wall bigger (so that you could lay it down in the desert and see it from space) is to replace each lego with a colored refrigerator box. The "resolution" will not be better, because you still have the same number and colors of boxes that you did Lego blocks.
I think this is a fun and tangible way to explain these concepts to a layman who doesn't work in the digital imaging world. I'm sure there are all sorts of other analogies to explain even further, but I think this works well for an introductory concept. I'm looking for a similar way to explain how "cropping" and "resizing" and "scaling" aren't the same thing and they affect "dimensions" and "proportions" differently. I thought something with a big wad of Silly Putty might do the trick (copy your image onto the silly putty and then stretch it to "resize" it or use a knife to "crop" it.) but I run into the problem of "resizing" versus "scaling." I've had many, many, many times where I'm asked (as a graphic designer) to take an image and resize it, only the customer wants a vastly different proportion for the final product (and 8x10 turned into a 11x17 for example). They want all of their image to show up, but also to fill up the 11x17, with no blank spaces and nothing cropped out of their 8x10. This means that I usually have to use Photoshop to clone some of the photo to fill up the negative space for the 11x17.
I'd like to have a simple, kindergarten way to explain how this works. Any suggestions?