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In either a print job or a digital picture at the smallest level there are individual color markers, in print that is called a dot, and on a computer, it's called a pixel. The difference between the two is whether the image is physical or digital.

On say a 4x6 inch picture, the more dots/pixels there are the better the quality will be.

Channels refer to colors/opacity, a 32bitmap image will have 4 channels Red, Blue, Green, and opacity while a grayscale image will only have one channel.

Bytes per pixel determine the amount of color. For instance, a 24-bit bitmap image has one 3 bytes per pixel, one byte per channel resulting in 256*256*256 possible color combinations. A grayscale bitmap on the other hand has one byte per pixel, resulting in 256 different combinations.

Atomic simply means that it's the smallest possible entity, it's not possible to split a pixel or dot any smaller.