Pixel Vs Vector

The most common graphic format that you can come across on the web is the bitmap. It is essentially a large grid filled with little squares. Each square is to be filled with a certain color. Enough colored squares force the mind to blend them together to form a picture. These tiny colored squares which form a bitmap are called pixels. And while a single image may consist of hundreds of thousands of these individual pixels, it can only be seen clearly when the image is magnified. Adobe Photoshop is one of the commonly used bitmap editors available in the market. Bitmaps are easy to work with and allow the user to enhance the image with intricate fills, shading and gradient effects. This feature is especially useful in the field of photography where one image can use millions of different colors. It is because of this striking aspect of bitmap graphics that magazine pictures are of such noticeable high quality. So when a bitmap image is saved on the computer, it is also storing the exact number of pixels found in that image. Each pixel is significant in dictating which color belongs where to make the image whole. A solitary pixel can be thought of as certain piece of a puzzle which only fits at a particular position and helps in telling the larger story. Taking this into account, while bitmaps can be downscaled, it cannot be made a larger size without the quality of the image going downhill. This is due to the fact that it take makes more pixels to fill the volume of a larger space and fewer pixels to accommodate into a smaller space. Making a bitmap image smaller simply involves reducing the number of pixels available in the original size to fit the smaller size. Computers are capable to perform this job and the quality of the image is not in the least bit affected. On the other hand, increasing the size of the bitmap graphic means the computer has to add additional pixels to fill the new size of the image. The computer has no source of information to retrieve new pixels so it interpolates from the image available. This guesswork is to blame for the now blurry image. And although Photoshop is equipped with tools that can sharpen a blurred image, it won’t achieve the same clarity as the original.

Vector graphics, on the other hand, are the complete opposite of bitmap graphics. Instead of pixels, vector graphics are comprised of points, lines, and curves which, when connected, form objects. Colors, patterns, and gradients can be applied to these objects using a vector editor. CorelDraw is one of the more popular vector editors in the market. In contrast to bitmap graphics, the software saves the instructions on how the image should be drawn rather than simply its appearance. Hence, a vector graphic is considered