Bitmap & Vector

Vector and Bitmap

In this assignment I’m going to be talking about Vector and Bitmap images, they are both types of pictures, or different way pictures are made to be viewed on screen e.g. computers. Both vector and bitmap images are always 2D.

 When you look at an image on a computer screen you properly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a vector or bitmap image, its only when you zoom in you can see the difference. Most images on computer screens are made up of bitmaps (raster images). Bitmaps are a map of little dots called pixels. You can see the Bitmaps if you zoom into a picture on the computer screen, the picture starts to look out of focus and you can see the tiny dots that make up the picture it makes the picture look very blocky. Pixels are tiny elements of colour you see on screen that make up all the colours of the image when you zoom in. Since the computer has to store information about every single pixel in the image, the file size of a bitmap graphic is often quite large compared to a vector graphic image. All the tiny dots of colour come together to create the image that you see. According to my research I found on, http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/aboutgraphics/a/bitmapvector.htm ’ Most computer monitors display approximately 70 to 100 pixels per inch--the actual number depends on your monitor and screen settings.’ If you want to edit a bitmap image it is much more complex than editing a vector image this is because you have to edit each pixel individually.

Vector graphics are different to Bitmap graphics because they are made up of paths instead of dots. Another difference is that if you zoom into a picture made of vectors is that the picture can be scaled larger or smaller without losing its quality, which seems to be the disadvantage of using Bitmap. You can create vector graphics in graphic packages such as  Adobe illustrator. If you did want to change the scale and enlarge a vector graphic it would be more succsesful than a bitmap image as it wouldn’t loose it quality and would look exactly the same just bigger. Vector graphics can be changed much eaiser than bitmap images not just by size, you can change the shape and colour and position. This means that you can edit each different object of the image. The file size of a vector graphic is usually very small even if it’s a large picture, this is because the vecotr graphic itself doesn’t take up much computer memory at all. Vector graphic’s unlike bitmap don’t look real they look almost cartoon.

Some software is better at creating and manipulating bitmaps or vector graphics.

Bitmap graphics can be created and edited using packages such as:

·         MS Paint

·         Adobe Photoshop

Vector graphics can be created using drawing packages, such as:

·         Adobe Illustrator

·         Adobe FreeHand

·         CorelDRAW

In conclusion you can see that vector images are more useful if you are thinking of resizing images or changing them. But bitmap images will be more helpful if your taking a picture with your digital camera and planning on keeping it the same without any editing or changing.