Digital Graphics Software

There are different types of Digital graphics software programs. They are Vector programs and Bitmap programs. Vector programs are things like Microsoft Visio and Bitmap programs are thigns like Microsoft Paint. There are also other things like photo manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop. There are also graphic facilities embedded within other application packages, such as Word.

Vector graphics use maths to draw pictures and images. The images that you create are precise because of this and it creates a very detailed image. You would use this when you are doing CAD/CAM as the image created would have to be very detailed. The main programs that you would use in this would be Microsoft Visio and Inscape. Inscape is a free open source program that you can download.

Bitmap graphics are made from pixels and each one of the pixels has its own colour. The colour is dependant on what bit depth the program uses. For example there is 32bit colour and 16 bit colour. The higher the bit depth the better quality the image will be. The only problem with this is that the image will be a lot bigger and take up more space. Also when you zoom in you will be able to see the pixels and it makes the image look bad. You would use a program like Microsoft Paint to create an image like this.

Photo Manipulation Software is a very good program for skilled people to make high quality pictures with. It is mainly used by professionals to make photos higher quality or to make high quality websites with. The main programs that are used with photo manipulation are Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. They are good programs but the only downside is that when the document is saved it is massive as there is a lot of pixels in the document. And saving this amount of pixels creates such a large file.

Embedded graphics facilities are in such programs like Microsoft Word. This allows the user to resize an image and crop it into size. It is not a very good editing tool, but it easy to use and for a novice can be a great thing to use.

Comparing Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint is fairly easy. In Paint you cant effectively resize images and keep the quality. In Adobe Photoshop you can easily do this as it is a very good photo editing piece of software. The only advantage of using paint is that it loads very fast and if you wanted to create a simple diagram or image you would be able to in a matter of minutes. If you wanted to do this in Photoshop you would have to wait for the program to load, choose the file size and type, find the right brush tool etc.