I'm a newbie when it comes to logo and banner designing. Recently, I've encountered new words like vector and raster. Most of graphic designers said that they play big roles and I should have better knowledge about these two. Can someone tell me what are vector and raster?
Vector graphics
Vector graphics are made up of paths or lines and they are mathematically designed. Generally, these are generated using illustration / drawing programs such as Adobe illustrator. You can use lines or curves to design the graphics. There is no problem with the quality of the graphics even you enlarge them as these are made up with lines. Most vector graphics are used for logo design, as it does not trim down the quality of the image even the image getting larger. The file extension represents as eps
Raster graphics
Raster graphics are generated through the images captured by digital cameras or scanners. These are made up of pixels. The editing programs like Adobe Photoshop create these graphics. File formats represent as JPG, Taft, psd. When you enlarge the image and when the pixel size also getting larger, the quality of the image will be dropped down
Regards
Susan
A raster graphic or bitmap is composed of pixels. The term pixel is short for "picture element." Resolution refers to how many pixels are in a given area. In a raster graphic the higher the resolution, the better the quality of the image, but the bigger the file size is created. When a bitmap image is enlarged, it becomes pixilated or each pixel form a square. It losses the exact detail or quality of the image. Simply because a bitmap is a dependent resolution graphics are generally composed of a tiny squares or pixels viewable on a computer or any display devices that make up the images. With that, it is difficult to translate the raster graphics into vector graphics. Some of the raster-based image formats, such as TIFF, JPEG and GIF, are created using any of the following editors: Painter, Photoshop, MS Paint, and GIMP, are working all throughout on pixels. This is why drawing objects-based editing works such as layout for books, logos, IDs are ideally created in vector graphics.
Example of showing effect of vector graphics versus bitmap graphics
A vector graphic is an independent resolution simply because it is not made up pixels. It is made up of lines, paths, shapes and colors using a mathematical formula to create a vector image. It is composed of starting and ending points for the lines and paths. And it is also composed of colors that fill in the path, shapes and borders. A mathematical formulas determine how to create the best quality of the image. Based on the points or dots that make the image, how to stretch, resize and color the component objects in the picture. It can be scaled up at any size without losing the exact detail and quality of the image. The printing quality of the image to the paper or any output devices will provide a sharper and higher quality of image resolution. A vector-based image format “AI” is created using Adobe Illustrator and working all throughout on drawing objects defined by mathematical formulas. Vector formats are not always appropriate to manipulate images from devices such as cameras and scanners which are made up of raster graphics and are not practical to convert into vectors, and so for this type of work, the Adobe Photoshop editor is suitable to operate on the pixels.
Regards,
Bonnevie
