The widespread mistake of thinking PPI/DPI matters in digital art.

There's one video on youtube I came across, about 10 mistakes digital artists make... all good, I click to watch it and find out if I was making any major mistakes. But I found one point in his video where he was making a major mistake and teaching that mistake to the viewers... I commented telling him about it, he replied that I "don't know what I'm talking about", I proceed to reply to that with a detailed explanation of the error... after which he deleted my and his comment.

Some of the points of the guy's video were debatable as artist style stuff, still worth considering though, all good and rather helpful video. But then he got to a point were he mentioned "resolution"'s importance, telling how the standard for printing is 300ppi and for web is 72ppi, then he displayed a 10 inch canvas at 300ppi, drew a line and zoomed in showing good detail and talking about the importance of working in high detail, then made a 10inch canvas at 72ppi, drew another line and zoomed in showing it very blurry and pixelated right away.

Now, if you're still reading me at this point in the journal, you should pay attention, because what he did there is something that I believe about 95% of the artists get wrong, from what I have seen around here.

The truth is that PPI and DPI means nothing in digital art. Your screen, and the web, displays just pixels... not pixels per inch, nor points per inch.. only pixels.

Time ago I made a "guide" exposing this PPI/DPI mistake: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10723384/

Not many people saw it, and less really understood what I was trying to talk about. And this is the problem, it's a mistake that is teached so early that people just accepts it as the truth and never question it again.

Even professional artists and many of the most popular artists here carry on this mistake and put in the description of their digital image what was their PPI setting on their drawing program. The fact of telling others what your PPI was, when you're showing the digital image, shows that you have embraced that mistake as truth.


-breaths- Okay, I think I've rambled enough. I'll just proceed to explain how it works, in case you wanna know xD

PPI only matters at the moment you're going to print a picture, not at the time of drawing it digitally.

When you're working your canvas in inches or centimeters, you're using an old interpretation method that was built in the drawing softwares to help traditional artists work in digital having a familiar environment. You make the program interpret pixel ammount as real distance in paper or real canvas, thus it reinterprets the image size and gives you a fake 100% zoom to compensate.. that's why that guy saw the lines all blurred and pixelated in his 72 ppi canvas.

You have to work your canvas in pixels, not inches or centimeters, you're using a screen, you don't need to try to make things work as if you're using a real canvas. If you just use your canvas in pixels, the ppi is irrelevant.. you can leave it at 2ppi and won't make a difference, the program won't need to interpret. If you want high detail, you make the canvas bigger in pixels: height and width.

This interpretation method made to make it easier for traditional artists to enter the digital environment, is what caused this mistake that has become massive.

The longer you have believed this mistake, the harder it will become for you to understand the truth. I tried explaining all this to a friend who is not yet started into digital art, and he got it really quick. But every time I have tried to explain this to someone who has been in art for a long time, they have a very hard time understanding, and mostly just get confused.

tl;dr: Use your canvas in pixels, not inches. The ppi setting will only matter at the moment you want to print the picture and you can change it then. If your printer's optimal printing resolution is 300ppi, then you change your picture's ppi to 300 without resampling, without resizing, and it will show you how much area it will use on paper... at this point you resize the picture's pixels to use the space you want in the paper for a perfect printing making the best of your art's detail.

If it's still confusing to you, and you wanna understand how this really works, feel free to comment or note me so I can try to explain a little better what you're confused about. I love when people is up for productive discussion and learning.

If you read all this, you're awesome... and I love you... and I would suck your dick/pussy (not literally, I just love you for reading all my thoughts xD) Have a nice day/night o/