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VECTOR VS. BITMAPPED ART
There are two basic types of
applications that produce digital art
vector and bitmap.
Vector art
is created in programs such as Adobe Illustrator, Freehand and CorelDraw. Some
other programs are also able to export their paths to illustrator file formats.
Also Photoshop can export to illustrator paths.
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VECTOR ART
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An example of
vector based art showing bezier curves, anchor points and handles used for
manipulating the curves.
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Bitmapped
art is created in photo editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop. The
difference between vector and bitmapped applications is how they draw and this
can have profound implications for the quality of your finished art.
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BITMAPPED ART
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An example of
bitmapped or raster art blown up beyond its optimum pixel per inch resolution.
Note the "pixelation" or raggedness.
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Vector art
is totally scalable with no distortions. You can take art created in Adobe
Illustrator and if it is totally made up of vector art it can be reduced to a
business card or enlarged to a billboard and suffer no distortion.
Bitmap art,
also known as raster or photographic art, is very different. Here the art is
not drawn. Instead each pixel is mapped, its position and color attributes
determined by the application at the time the art is created. What this means
is that when you enlarge, each individual pixel is enlarged with no additional
detail being added. In short, it pixelates the image, the image becomes ragged
resulting in the zig-zags that people have comes to associate with digital art
that is at the exceeded its ideal resolution.
Resolution in a bitmapped file
refers to its number of pixels per inch (ppi). As an example, the resolution of
art created for web sites is 72 ppi at 100% size. (72 ppi is the resolution of
your computer's monitor.) If you were to take that 72 ppi and enlarge it 200%
the resulting resolution becomes 36 ppi -- no matter what the application tells
you and it's here you can begin to see the dynamics at work with bitmapped
images.
In short, you can't add additional pixels where there are none.
Your application will gladly take an already-created digital file and tell you
it's increasing the resolution. It will even increase the file size in both
dimensions and data-file size, number of Megabytes, etc., but the application
is lying to you because while the application can increase the dimensions it
can't supply addition detail that not's in the already-created bitmapped file
and it is that additional detail that you really need when you enlarge a
bitmapped image.
The general rule for enlarging already-created bitmapped art is
that you'll never gain detail. What you see is what you get.
So if
you're creating a banner from scratch in a bitmapped photo editing program such
as Adobe Photoshop use an image resolution of 100 ppi at full size. That means
if you have an image that is, for example, 8" x 10" at 300ppi, it can be blown
up 300% to 24" x 30" to give you a final image of 100 ppi.
Now I'm
goingn to repeat what was said earlier because it is important: It can be
difficult to find images of sufficiently high resolution so some think that by
"sampling up" a lower res image they will get a higher resolution. Don't be
fooled. There is no point in doing this. If all you have is an image with an
effective resolution of 50 ppi at full size, then sampling it up will not give
you more detail. That additional detail you will need is simply not there in
the image. Sampling up a low-resolution image will just give you a much larger
file with the same (insufficient) amount of detail.
The lowest
we can go is 50 ppi images. We prefer 100 ppi.
We will always notify you before
printing if the print quality is questionable. We provide the same level of
service to every client.
For best results, artwork should be made into vectors
(i.e. outlines, curves) wherever possible.
Any other questions you have we
will be glad to answer. Simply fill out the form and click Submit or call
1-203-327-1441.
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