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What to try
- Click a cell, or focus the microscope and move with the arrow keys.
- Change R, G, B or alpha, then compare the three grid resolutions.
What to look for: Editing alpha reveals the checkerboard beneath one stored pixel. The raw byte count changes with the number of samples, even though the display occupies the same space.
How it works
Each location has red, green, blue and alpha values. Alpha controls coverage: zero is transparent and 255 is opaque in the Lab’s eight-bit channel buffers. A transparent pixel still occupies a position in the grid. Displaying the image over a checkerboard makes that transparency visible without changing the stored image.
Painting changes these samples. Enlarging the display makes existing samples easier to inspect; resampling creates a different grid. A 256 × 256 image contains 65,536 pixels at every display zoom. Enlarging it to 512 × 512 creates four times as many samples, but does not recover detail that was never captured.
Use it in the Lab
In the Lab, choose document dimensions before drawing fine details. Use zoom for inspection and Resize when you intentionally want a different pixel grid. Export a PNG to preserve the resulting raster.
Limits & distinctions
The Lab works with eight-bit RGBA pixels. A project file preserves layers and frames; a flattened image does not retain those editing structures.
Sources & references
Guide updated