High resolution pictures get pixelated in photoshop

[bucfan762000]

Why are all my pictues pixelated in photoshop, even original high resolution pictures get pixelated when you zoom past 500%.  I get white mesh pattern when zooming in.  When you paste a picture into Photoshop the pic is blurry, even when original is 300 dpi.  Whats going on. if I resize the picture (even smaller) it gets 100 x worse.

Photoshop 24.0 Release

Windows 11

[Derek Cross]

What are the dimensions (in pixels) of your high-resolution images?

[D Fosse]

What you need to understand is that zoom % in Photoshop has nothing to do with size. It is the relationship between image pixels and screen pixels. At 100%, one image pixel is represented by exactly one physical screen pixel.

At 500%, each image pixel is represented by 25 screen pixels! That's pretty big, almost the size of a small icon. So yes, naturally it gets pixelated.

Photoshop only works with pixels, and ppi, pixels per inch, is not a property of the file. It's a standard formula for pixel density on paper, used to determine the physical size in print of a given file. As size goes up, pixel density goes down. You only have so many pixels.

Ppi in itself means nothing. A file can be 1 ppi or 1247 ppi and it's the same file. To have any meaning, ppi needs to be expressed at a certain print size, or to a certain pixel size. Pixels per inch is an equation with three variables. If you have two variables, you can calculate the third.

On screen, ppi doesn't apply. A display has its own native pixel grid. There's no such pixel grid on paper, so one has to be defined. That's ppi.