Captain Bitmap Vs. Vectorman Saco ME

Posted by : Joe Farace

Art, no matter how you produce it, requires tools. As we approach the real millennium, the favorite tool for many artists is the computer. While hardware makes it possible to create digital graphics, software enables the artist to harness the computer's energy and create illustrations, photographs, and drawings.

To those computer users who don't work with graphics software on a regular basis, the difference between programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia FreeHand might not seem significant. While digital designers use both programs to create art, that's the only aspect that paint and draw programs have in common. The real difference between these two kinds of software boils down to the fact that paint programs, such as Photoshop, work with bitmapped images, while draw software, like FreeHand, works with vector-based images.

Why so many programs?

There are three basic classes of graphics image files: bitmap, metafile, and vector. A bitmap (sometimes called raster) file is made up of a collection of individual pixels-one for every point on a computer screen. The simplest one-bit files are monochrome images and are composed of a single color against a background. Images that display more shades of color or gray need more than one bit to define those colors. In fact, the more bits in a file, the more colors that can be displayed and manipulated.

Click here to read the rest of this article from Computer User