# What Is a Digital Image?

**Track:** Imaging — beginner / high school — Digital & Generative Imaging — proposed
**Framework / surface:** ij8 Studio (generation presets)
**Level:** Beginner
**Prerequisites:** none

**In one line:** Pixels, resolution, aspect ratio, file formats.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

A digital image is a grid — a raster — of pixels, each one a sampled point of color stored as numbers. Resolution counts those pixels, width by height; aspect ratio fixes the rectangle's proportions and, with them, the frame a composition must inhabit. File formats trade fidelity against size: JPEG discards detail to shrink, PNG preserves every pixel. Learning to see the grid means understanding that smooth tone and sharp edge alike are illusions assembled from discrete samples — a logic Georges Seurat anticipated in pointillism, building luminous fields from separate dots that the eye fuses into form. Detail is finite; how it is spent matters.