Is it possible to place images at their actual, original, 100% PIXEL dimensions while ignoring resolution?

[kelly_knowles]

I know this has been asked before but none of those posts had the answer I'm looking for. Maybe if we complain enough Adobe will add an option for us?

The problem I'm having is when I drag an image into a photoshop file to place it, it gets shrunk down considerably. It's not that it's placing it at, say, 25% to make it easier on me--it's telling me its at 100%. I know that's not true, cause if I copy/paste the image in the old fashioned way, its FAR bigger. I really need these images at their original honest-to-god size, so I know what I'm actually working with.

From what I've gathered this is because of the image's resolution. I design for the web so I don't care about inches/resolution, only pixels. I feel like that's a perfectly valid use case so I'm surprised this doesn't seem possible. It's really not practical for me to go through aaalllll of my image assets and change their resolution.

I've tried every combination of checking/unchecking:

• Resize Image During Place
• Skip Transform When Placing
• Always Create Smart Object when Placing

But none of those solve it.

Am I missing something, or do we need an "Ignore Resolution when Placing" option?

Pretty please? ?

[D Fosse]

You apparently have a 4K/UHD display.

If Photoshop reports 100%, that's what it is: one image pixel represented by exactly one screen pixel. That's what 100% means.

Other, consumer oriented, viewers and web browsers scale up when a high-density display is detected. They may represent one image pixel by four screen pixels - IOW 200%. They do this so that things appear at the same size people are used to from traditional displays.

[kelly_knowles]

Yeah I've got those monster Apple monitors. So does that mean... the image I'm placing was created on a regular monitor, so its pixels are defined differently? So my monitor won't understand its dimensions the same way? I desperately want to ignore that & the image's resolution and just work with... pixel-pixels. The smallest unit of the image, and how many of those define its height and width. I'm not worried if some monitors are doubling that when they display it. I want it to be consistent on my monitor while I'm working. Not sure how to explain myself...

I just created a new photoshop document, with the exact pixel dimensions of the image I want to place, but 72 PPI instead of 300 PPI. When I placed the 600x600(300ppi) pixel image into my 600x600(72ppi) pixel document, it was WAY smaller, but still told me it was 100%. If we're talking pixels, that's just stone-cold incorrect. Unless I don't understand pixels anymore. (OR when Photoshop's free-transform tells me 100%, its not necessarily talking about pixels?)

Do I need to submit some kind of feedback/feature request to ignore resolution when placing? Or is it just not possible, in this day & age of a million different screen resolutions/pixel densities, to reliably define what 1 pixel is?

[D Fosse]

The screen pixels on your Apple display are much smaller than the screen pixels on a standard, traditional display. They have to be, to cram in more of them.

So the same image, the same number of pixels, will display large on one, and small on the other. Because the screen pixels are large or small.

It's important to always hold on to the basic premise here: At 100%, Photoshop represents one image pixel by exactly one screen pixel.

Pixels per inch, ppi, is a print parameter that has no relevance on screen. It can be 72, 144, 300, 10 000, it doesn't matter. Screen size is the same. Just put the whole concept of ppi out of your head, it doesn't apply here.

However. Most other applications (including the native Mac apps) confuse the issue no end. To "help" you, they decided to scale up, so that they display at the same screen size that you are used to from old-fashioned, non-retina, non-4K monitors. So they pixel-double. This upscaling is done automatically when a high resolution display is detected. They are wrong, and Photoshop is right.

---

One more thing. Photoshop Smart Objects is a wonderful thing, but they have one slightly confusing property: when placed, they honor physical print dimensions, not pixel dimensions. So here ppi does matter, but it's important to realize that this is a side effect, so to speak. It's not native Photoshop behavior. There's a preference here about scaling or not scaling when placing.

[kelly_knowles]

I think I may need to clarify that by 100%, I'm not talking about the zoom level that I'm viewing my Photoshop document at. I'm talking about placing a JPG into a PSD by dragging an image from a folder into a Photoshop document. The toolbar for free transform is telling me the height & width of the image layer is "100.00%". I get that there are all kinds of monitors with different numbers of differently sized pixels, but I'm experiencing these inconsistencies on my one monitor.

Here's a screengrab of what I'm talking about:

Dropbox - photoshop-placing-problems.mp4

What I want to happen is when I drag & place an image into Photoshop, it ignores the resolution and places it at actual 100% pixel size. I know there are preferences for: Resize Image During Place, Always Create Smart Object when Placing, and Skip Transform when Placing. I've tried checking and unchecking these in all sorts of combinations (and restarting Photoshop to ensure my settings take effect) but nothing helps. (Sure, I can just manually drag & scale the image up, but in real-world cases I don't know if I'm actually scaling it up past 100% and causing it to get pixelly & ugly.)

One more thing. Photoshop Smart Objects is a wonderful thing, but they have one slightly confusing property: when placed, they honor physical print dimensions, not pixel dimensions. So here ppi does matter, but it's important to realize that this is a side effect, so to speak. It's not native Photoshop behavior. There's a preference here about scaling or not scaling when placing.

This might actually be it... In the example I recorded, I had disabled "Create Smart Object when Placing," so I was just placing a regular ole raster image. But, it was definitely taking resolution into account, cause it was not placed at the correct size. If that's only supposed to happen to smart objects, perhaps a bug report is in order?

[melissapiccone]

Hey Kelly - I found another work around for you. If you open your 300ppi in photoshop and then drag and drop it into your new document, it goes in correctly. The little tiny image was dragged and dropped from my desktop - and it comes in as smart object. The full size image came from the inside of PS - just dragged it over - did not come in as a smart object.

[kelly_knowles]

Yesss this is all super helpful, thank you so much Melissa!

[melissapiccone · Accepted solution]

I just tested this on my Windows Surface - I think it's a bug. I made a 600x600 300ppi image on my Mac. On the Surface, I made a 600x600 px 72ppi document in PS - dropped the 300ppi image in there and it came in tiny and said it was 100%. There is a disconnect in there with the ppi settings and pixel dimensions.

Realizing the disconnect - I just did the same exact thing on my mac - with a normal monitor. This has absolutely nothing to do with the monitor. And I repeated your issue.

A suggestion, something you can try - is to create an action that opens your images and resets the ppi to 72. I know it's not an ideal solution, but should work for now.

Report it: Feature Request/Bug Report Form

[D Fosse]

melissapiccone  wrote

I made a 600x600 300ppi image on my Mac. On the Surface, I made a 600x600 px 72ppi document in PS - dropped the 300ppi image in there and it came in tiny and said it was 100%.

Yes, that's what I said. This is normal smart object behavior, it's not a bug.

Copy/paste goes by pixels. Smart Objects go by print dimensions.

The Transform 100% notification has no relation to any of this! It just means the layer hasn't (yet) been scaled - it says nothing about size, whether in pixels or print dimensions, or anything in relation to the other layers. Instead of 100% it could just as well be called "zero".

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

A couple of scripts to help automate this can be found here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/scripts-to-place-embedded-amp-place-l...