Resources Research Shannon Ciriaco

Graphic cards, otherwise known as video cards is a printed circuit board which generates images to display. Most graphic cards offer functions such as rendering 3D scenes, 2D graphics, TV outputs, TV-tuner adapter etc. Graphic cards turns pixels from a screen into a picture that we are able to see. They do this by using these four main components: A motherboard connection for data and power A processor to decide what to do with each pixel A memory to hold all the pixels And finally a monitor connection so we’ll be able to see the translated picture.

A graphics tablet is an input device that lets the user to hand-draw images/graphics just like how a person would draw on a paper with a pencil. They can be used for capturing data or even handwriting a signature. It can also be used to trace images from a piece of paper. Graphics tablet consists of a flat surface which the user may draw on and an attached stylus. When you draw on a graphics tablet, the image doesn’t literally come up on the surface but on the monitor.

There are certain things that digital cameras can do that a film camera cannot such as displaying images on the screen once it's recorded, storing a number of images on a single memory and deleting images for more storage space. The majority of digital cameras can record moving videos with sound as well as still photographs. some can even crop and stitch pictures or any other ways to edit an image. Some can have a GPS built in which tells you the place where you took the certain photograph from. A digital camera is a camera that lets you take videos, photographs or both by recording images through an electronic image sensor. Most cameras today are digital, which is mainly used in the field of digital photography.

A printer is a device which produces a text or graphics of documents from a computer. Most printers are attached to the computer with a printer cable or, like most printers now a days, they’re connected by a USB cable. Some printers (network printers) have a built- in network interfaces typically wireless or Ethernet based. Modern printers can directly interface to electronic media such as memory cards. Some also comes in with a built-in scanner or fax machine and can function photocopies.

Monitors, sometimes called a visual display unit, is an electronic visual display for computers. It is an output device which provides instant feedback by showing you texts or graphics as you use the computer. Computer monitors today are mostly LCDs with a thin panel. The very first monitors (Cathode Ray Tubes) were very big, it was the dominant technology until they were replaced by LCD monitors in the 21 st century

It is a compact disc that contains accessible data to computers for data storage and music playback. CD-ROMS are popularly used for distributing computer software such as video games and programs that you can install on your computer. A CD-Rom contains 2, 352 bytes divided into byte frames. CD-Roms cannot rely on error concealment which means they require a higher reliability of the retrieved data.

HDDs are able to retain stored information even when it’s not powered. It has rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data from HDDs are magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that floats on the film of air above the platters. Hard disk drives have been a dominant device for secondary storage of data in general purpose computers since the early 1960s.

A Memory Secure Digital Card is an electronic flash memory data storage device. It is used for storing digital information such as images, music and other files. SD Cards are commonly used in electronic devices such as digital cameras, mobile phones, laptop, MP3 players and other video game consoles. Memory SD Cards are small and are able to keep files without needing power.

Vector Graphic Software is a computer program that allows the users to edit/produce vector graphic images and save them in one of many vector graphic formats such as EPS, PDF, WMF, SVG or VML. Some vector editors support animation and in fact, vector graphics are more suitable for animation. They are closely related to publishing softwares such as Adobe InDesign and Scribus which also includes some vector drawing tools.

Bitmap software is a computer program that allows users to paint or edit pictures and save them as one of bitmap or raster formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF. An example of this software is the PaintShop Pro. Bitmap softwares are more suitable for enhancing photographs like photo processing, photo-realistic illustrations, collage and hand-drawn images using a graphics tablet.

A raster graphics, otherwise known as bitmap is composed of a grid of pixels viewable on a computer monitor or paper. Raster graphics are more suitable for photographs and realistic images than vector graphics which are better for texts and graphic designs. BitmapVector The larger you display a bitmap, the more you’ll see the pixels while a vector image remains smooth at any image size.

A Photo Manipulation Software is a computer program that allows users to edit images to use different editing techniques to photographs. A famous software is Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop enables you to manipulate visual images on the computer. Most photographers today uses Photoshop as it easily allows them to edit their photo by adding or taking things out of it.

I think that the best software to create/edit images is Adobe Photoshop (Photo Manipulation Software) because it is very easy to use. It has the ability to read and write bit-map and vector image formats such as.EPG,.PNG,.JPEG and.GIF – which is the exact reason why I chose this over the vector graphic software (Corel) and the bitmap software (PaintShop Pro). Vector Graphic Softwares can only read and write on EPS, PDF, WMF, SVG or VML. Bitmap Software may be able to read and write JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF files, but it is more suitable for just enhancing photographs. Photoshop reads and writes many image formats, and is still very versatile when it comes to editing.

Photoshop and Paint Microsoft Paint offers only the very basic and simple image editing. Whereas Photoshop is for a more professional use that offers several features that could improve an image with high quality. Photoshop offers a lot smarter features such as the clone stamp tool which you could use if you do not want a certain part of an image and go over it by cloning another part that you like. Paint is a very basic programme that it could only be good in use for drawings. It doesn’t offer very much options to come into comparison with Photoshop when it comes to photo editing. If I were to choose between the two, I would use Photoshop because it offers a lot more tools that I could use for editing and make an image on a high standard.

People may want to convert files if they want to save space. Another reason could be that other web pages doesn’t support the certain file format that’s why they will have to convert it into something that the web page allows. You could also have a file that is saved as different formats for safety. If a file has been accidentally deleted, having a copy of it is helpful even if it’s in a different format. You could easily find a computer program that converts a file format to another.

 BMP – otherwise know as a Bitmap Image File is a raster image file format that allows you to store bitmap digital images. BMP is capable of storing 2D digital images of a certain width, height, and resolution, both monochrome and colour in various colour depths.  PNG – stands for Portable Network Graphics. It is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. It was created to improve and replace GIF as an image-file format not needing a license. PNG supports images with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colours, grayscale images (with or without alpha channel) and RGB(A) images. PNG was designed for transferring images on the internet and not for professional-quality print graphics.  GIF – stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It is a bitmap image format introduced in it supports up to 8-bits per pixel which allows a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colours.  JPEG – stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. JPEG is commonly used in digital photography. Its degree compression can be adjusted between a storage size and image quality. It usually achieves 10:1 compression. JPEG supports a maximum image size of 65535×65535.