Adobe Photoshop

1. Adobe Photoshop A leading paint program from Adobe Systems, Inc. For many years, Photoshop has been the model against which other paint programs are compared. Initially, it ran only on Macintosh systems, which was a strong selling point for Macs, especially among graphic artists. Today, Photoshop runs on both Macs and Windows PCs.

2. Vector Graphic • Unlike JPEGs, GIFs, and BMP images, vector graphics are not made up of a grid of pixels. Instead, vector graphics are comprised of paths, which are defined by a start and end point, along with other points, curves, and angles along the way. A path can be a line, a square, a triangle, or a curvy shape. These paths can be used to create simple drawings or complex diagrams. Paths are even used to define the characters of specific typefaces.

3. Because vector-based images are not made up of a specific number of dots, they can be scaled to a larger size and not lose any image quality. If you blow up a raster graphic, it will look blocky, or "pixelated." When you blow up a vector graphic, the edges of each object within the graphic stay smooth and clean. This makes vector graphics ideal for logos, which can be small enough to appear on a business card, but can also be scaled to fill a billboard. Common types of vector graphics include Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and EPS files. Many Flash animations also use vector graphics, since they scale better and typically take up less space than bitmap images. • File extensions: .AI, .EPS, .SVG, .DRW

4. BITMAP IMAGS • A bitmap is a type of graphic composed of pixels (picture element) in a grid. Each pixel or "bit" contains color information for the image. Bitmap graphics formats have a fixed resolution which means that resizing a bitmap graphic can result in distortion and jagged edges.

5. Many graphical user interfaces use bitmaps in their built-in graphics subsystems;for example, the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 platforms' GDI subsystem, where the specific format used is the Windows and OS/2 bitmap file format, usually named with the file extension of .BMP (or .DIB for device-independent bitmap). Besides BMP, other file formats that store literal bitmaps include Interleaved Bitmap (ILBM), Portable Bitmap (PBM), X Bitmap (XBM), and Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap (WBMP). Similarly, most other image file formats, such as JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and GIF, also store bitmap images (as opposed to vector graphics), but they are not usually referred to as bitmaps, since they use compressed formats internally.

6. RGB • A common color mode, RGB stands for the colors of Red, Green, Blue. Add red, green, and blue light to create white light. Because you ADD the colors together to get White, we call these RGB colors the additive primaries. Colors on screen are displayed by mixing varying amounts of red, green, and blue light.

7. CMYK • Stands for "Cyan Magenta Yellow Black." These are the four basic colors used for printing color images. Unlike RGB (red, green, blue), which is used for creating images on your computer screen, CMYK colors are "subtractive." This means the colors get darker as you blend them together. Since RGB colors are used for light, not pigments, the colors grow brighter as you blend them or increase their intensity. • Technically, adding equal amounts of pure cyan, magenta, and yellow should produce black. However, because of impurities in the inks, true black is difficult to create by blending the colors together. This is why black (K) ink is typically included with the three other colors. The letter "K" is used to avoid confusion with blue in RGB.