Technical File

By David Sharples

Pixel And Resolution

• The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by different factors in cathode ray tube (CRT), Flat panel display which includes Liquid crystal displays, or projection displays using fixed picture-element (pixel) arrays.

Vector And Raster Images

• There are two kinds of computer graphics - raster (composed of pixels) and vector (composed of paths). Raster images are more commonly called bitmap images. A bitmap image uses a grid of individual pixels where each pixel can be a different colour or shade. Bitmaps are composed of pixels. Vector graphics use mathematical relationships between points and the paths connecting them to describe an image. Vector graphics are composed of paths.

File Formats and Uses

• BMP - The BMP file format, also known as bitmap image file or device independent bitmap (DIB) file format or simply a bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (such as a graphics adapter), especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems.

• PNG - Portable Network Graphics is a raster graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was created as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).

• GIF- The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.

• TIFF - TIFF (originally standing for Tagged Image File Format) is a file format for storing images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry,and both amateur and professional photographers in general

• JPG - In computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital photography (image). The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable trade-off between storage size and image quality

• PSD - Photoshop files have default file extension as .PSD, which stands for "Photoshop Document." A PSD file stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, CMYK Mode (used for commercial printing), transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings.

• PDF - Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format used to represent documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.

• EPS - Encapsulated PostScript, or EPS, is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions which is intended to be usable as a graphics file format.

• AI - Adobe Illustrator Artwork (AI) is a proprietary file format developed by Adobe Systems for representing single-page vector-based drawings in either the EPS or PDF formats. The .ai filename extension is used by Adobe Illustrator.

Compression

• In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Compression can be either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy.

Optimising

• Optimising is labelling things to make it easier to find, for example if your making a game and have a 10 different types of trees you would call them Tree001 instead of tree with long branch

Storage And Asset Management

• Storage and asset management is basically storing files into appropriate folders so things are easier to find.