Tag Archive for Digital Images

admin | January 14, 2009
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Image Formats In Photoshop

Photoshop is capable of adjusting to numerous ‘types’ of formats and its tools if used to their full capacity can create some amazing results including even the smallest detailing, It also uses many different formats and there are advantages and disadvantages to which format you choose to save your work in.

Photoshop can also open and save several kinds of files and the more you further your knowledge as to why these files exist you can apply the correct files to the correct image type. When choosing your file format there are three main things you should consider which will help you to determine how to save your file – web use, layering and image quality.

Image quality begins when you first take a photograph with your camera, you should use the highest pixel setting that your camera contains because the higher the level of pixilation the better the quality of the final image, but this also means that the higher the quality of the image the bigger the overall file size will be. You camera will give you the option of how high or low you want the pixilation to be, so change this in accordance to what the final image is going to be used for.

Photographs are best taken as a raw image to begin with as you will have the option to convert them into a smaller file once you have imported them onto your computer, and the larger the image is to begin with I have found, the easier it will be to manipulate using Photoshop’s tools. Photographs can be imported as JPEG’s or as a raw image but if you save as a JPEG you will lose some of the quality of the image from the start. 

Category: Image Formats, Photoshop | Tags: , , ,
admin | December 30, 2008
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Graphic Images And TIFF Files

Graphic images do not normally have a continuous tone unless a gradient has been used within the graphic. Graphics are drawings are not like photos plus they usually use few colours, less than 16 colours in the whole image. In a colour graphic cartoon, a particular area of colour will use one shade, where as in a photograph there may be numerous shades of one colour.

A map is produced using graphics and only uses 4 – 5 map colours plus 1 – 2 colours of text and then blue water and white paper, so these types of graphics use less than 16 colours, Graphics like this are ideal for Indexed Colour.

The TIFF file format is the best image file to use when best quality is required, and this is why the TIFF is common in professional and commercial printing environments. High Quality large JPG images are also good too, but they can be ruined if they are made too small. The 2D digital image is split into two parts, images know as ‘bitmapped’ are usually used in image making programmes such as Photoshop or painting packages, bitmap images are usually made up of rectangle picture elements known as pixels and each pixel is a colour, if the image is enlarged you can see these pixels and the image appears jagged, this can be improved by increasing the number of pixels per inch, known as a higher resolution image.

The other part is known as a ‘vector’ image and these are used in drawing and illustration programmes like Adobe Illustrator, a vector image is made up using lines and shapes, if the vector image is enlarged the quality will not degrade and the smoothness of the final image is only determined by the output device used to print the image.

Category: Content, Tutorials | Tags: , , ,
admin | December 23, 2008
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The Best Digital Image Files To Use In Design

There are four most common image files which are used in design today, these being – JPEG, GIF, TIFF and PNG. These image files have their own individual ways of storing colour modes. A JPEG image using RGB mode will store 24 bits per pixel or 8 bits per pixel in Grayscale mode.

A GIF image file provides indexed colour at 1 or 8 bits per pixel. A TIFF image using RGB mode will store 24 or 48 bits per pixel or 8 or 16 bits in grayscale mode and at indexed colour holds 1 or 8 bits per pixel. A PNG image file using RGB mode will store 24 or 48 bits, grayscale 8 or 16 bits and indexed colour 1 or 8 bits.            

Photographic images usually have continuous tones within the image, this means that pixels that are positioned close together usually have similar colours, and for example, a photo of green grass will contain numerous shades of green. A JPEG photographic image is usually 24-bit RGB colour, or 8 bit grayscale, and a typical colour photograph may contain around 100,000 colours, out of the possible set of 16 million colours in 24-bit RGB colour.  

Website pages require JPG, GIF or PNG image types, because that is all that online browsers can show. JPG is the best choice on the web for photo images as it is the smallest sized file and website pages tend to use the GIF format for any graphic images e.g. logos or line art.                         

Category: Tutorials | Tags: , , , , , ,