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Standard Graphics
General Tips
There are two major types of graphic formats: bitmap and vector. Basically, bitmaps are made of dots or pixels, while vector graphics are made of lines or geometry. Generally speaking, bitmaps do not scale (grow or shrink) well, while vector graphics do. If you wish to scale a bitmap, be sure that you only go from large to small, rather than small to large. This will help retain as much of a bitmap’s quality as possible (and in some cases “increase” quality). The disadvantages to vector graphics are diversity of content and overall compatibility. Web graphics (except in the case of special plug-ins) are almost universally bitmapped, and any type of photographic imagery is always bitmapped (due to the nature of the content).
Files of type or extension BMP, TIFF, GIF and JPEG are the most popular bitmapped formats. Bitmapped graphics generally fall into two different categories: compressed or compressible (“lossy”), and non-compressed or compressionless (“lossless”).
BMP and TIFF are “lossless” formats, meaning that when output is directed to one of these file types, no compression takes place and the majority of the image’s qualities are retained. The major disadvantage to “lossless” file types is file size, which can easily run into megabytes. With this in mind, these are poor for Web or for any other use where the smaller a file size is the better.
GIF and JPEG are “lossy” formats. For the advantage of very small file sizes, image quality is often degraded. GIF format graphics can have a transparent color set, which is ideal for certain Web graphics, but is limited to a maximum of 256 total colors. JPEG format graphics cannot have transparency, but do support millions of colors. This makes JPEG’s ideal for Web photos and other color-intensive graphics. Occasionally, GIF’s yield better results than JPEG’s, and vice-versa, often in unexpected ways. Experimentation between GIF and JPEG compression levels and usage often yields advantages in the smallest possible file sizes with the lowest amount of quality loss.
Example of a Bitmap Image
Resizing may cause a loss of image quality
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