Unit 30 P1 – Hardware & Software Required For Use In Digital Graphics Emily Riley

Monitors The monitor is an essential piece of computing equipment needed for a desktop computer or laptop computer (although already built in to a laptop computer), the monitor is the key way at looking through the information in image form, the images produced by a monitor are made up of millions of pixels, the size and resolution however varies. Some people like to have more than one monitor connected to a computer because it gives them dual control.

HDD – Hard Disk Drive A HDD is a data storage device. All computers will have a HDD, although external hard drives can be brought and they just simply connect via USB. External hard drives come in many different memory capacity’s ranging from 1GB to 1TB. They also come in many different shapes and models, for example; USB sticks and flash drives.

Graphics Card The graphics card job is to take information in the form of binary data and then translate it into an image to be projected to a video display devise such as a monitor or projector. Graphics cards tend to have there own processor, this is normally a GPU or graphical processing unit along with a cooling system due to the large amount of power it uses and heat it produces.

Graphics Tablet Graphics tablets or drawing tablets as they are sometimes know as are input devices that are normally used for graphic design. Graphic tablets enable users to hand draw images as if drawing with pencil and paper. Some graphic tablets feature an LED screen so that users can view what they are drawing on the tablet for precision. Although many tablets do not feature this because it is not always necessary as the image is also displayed on the monitor/screen.

Printers A printer is a peripheral which makes a representation of an electronic document on physical media e.g paper. This document is sent from a computer to the printer usually by USB , or on a larger scale by using a wireless network to more than one computer. Individual printers are designed to support local and network users at the same time. Some printers can print documents stored on memory cards or from digital cameras and scanners.

Digital Camera A digital camera is a piece of equipment that records and stores pictures onto a memory card instead of a film. A memory card can hold many more photos than an ordinary film camera and so is now a more preferred. Videos generally take up more space than photographs because they are done in frames, although not all digital cameras take videos. Generally images from a digital camera are imported onto a computer via USB, although some cameras can upload photos via Bluetooth and Wifi connection.

Scanner A scanner is a device that optically scans images, handwriting, objects, or printed text, and converts it to a digital image or can print an exact replica of the document. Scanners are most formally known as office equipment, the most common kind of scanner is the desktop scanner or ‘flatbed’ scanner, there are also hand-held scanners which are moved by hand and 3D scanners which are used for industrial design. A lot of people use scanners to retrieve images and documents that have not been backed up on a hard drive or online drive.

Paint Paint is a basic form of image creating software released by Microsoft and has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The program opens and saves files as Windows bitmap (24-bit, 256 color, 16 color, and monochrome, all with the .bmp extension), JPEG, GIF (without animation or transparency.) Paint on Windows 7 is considered the most advanced yet as it includes a wide range of ‘artists’ brushes and tools. Paint is usually used for pixel art as it uses bitmap technology.

Paint Shop Pro PaintShop Pro was originally created as a raster graphics editor only and became a vector graphics editor later in its series for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. PaintShop Pro is an affordable yet flexible and powerful photo editor and graphic design tool that offers photo enhancement tools for correcting color and tone, red eye, noise, and other common problems. Painshop Pro is for beginners and professional use and includes a mixture of ‘fun’ and serious tools for editing.

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a profession photo editing software developed by Adobe Systems. Photoshop is a very large programme with a variety of tools to use for photo editing, and so most of the techniques are not suitable for beginners. Although there are different tutorials available for beginners who are looking to improve their skills using the software.

Raster s/w and Bitmap s/w In computer graphics, Raster graphics or Bitmap are a matrix dot structure representing a generally rectangle grid of pixels, or points of colour. This is viewable via a monitor or other display medium. The way raster images are stored is by images files using a variety of formats.

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