Roxanne Caruana

Design Foundation Studies 2010

12/11/2010

Bitmaps or Raster images Bitmap images (or raster images) are made up of pixels in a grid. Pixels are picture elements; tiny dots of individual color that make up what we see on our screen. These tiny dots of color come together to form the images you see. For instance, the icons on a desktop are usually 32 by 32 pixels, which mean that there are 32 dots of color going in each direction. Moreover, on enlarging a bitmap, every single colour square dot is visible. Bitmap images are resolution dependent. Resolution refers to the number of pixels in an image and is usually stated as dpi (dots per inch) or ppi (pixels per inch). Raster images have a certain amount of pixels within each inch. For example, a 72 dpi(dots per inch) image has 72 pixels in every inch(ppi). Usually, the higher the dpi, the higher the quality. When required to provide a high resolution image file, the file must have been created or scanned at both the dimension and the resolution required. Since bitmaps are resolution dependent, it's difficult to increase or decrease their size without sacrificing a quantity of image quality. On reducing the size of a bitmap image through the software's resize command, some of the pixels are thrown away. On increasing the size of a bitmap image through a software's resize command, the software itself has to create new pixels. It also has to estimate the color values of the new pixels based on the surrounding pixels. This process is called interpolation. Scaling an image does not affect the image permanently as it does not change the number of pixels in the image. However, if a bitmap image is scaled to a larger size in the page layout software a definite jagged appearance will result. Scaling a bitmap image to a smaller size doesn't have any effect; in fact, when this is done the ppi of the image is effectively increased so that it will print clearer. Bitmap images in general do not inherently support transparency. A common misconception is that the transparent areas in an image will remain transparent when an image is saved to another format or copied and pasted into another program. That just doesn't work; however, there are techniques for hiding or blocking out areas in a bitmap that you intend to use in other software. Common bitmap formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG, PNG, PICT (Macintosh), PCX, TIFF, PSD (Adobe Photoshop). Bitmap editing programs: Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint, Corel Paint Shop Pro, The GIMP.