Bitmap and Vector Image types

Bitmap and Vector

There are many similarities and differences between bitmap and vector, aswell as advantages and disadvantages between the two of them, this blog looks to explain some of these similarities and differences

Bitmap and Vector compared.

There are quite a few bitmap image types, such as bmp, jpeg, gif and png just to name a few; as for Vector there are fewer, such as svg or ai. The main difference between bitmap and vectors is in the way that images are processed, in a bitmap file the image is made up of individual squares, to make an image look like what it is meant to show you, there must be at least hundreds of thousands if not millions of these in a single image, these are shown via pixels on a monitor screen, that light up according to the information being sent by the image to your computer and then to your screen. A vector image is not just a set of blocks that make something glow a certain colour, it is a file that contains not only the location of the blocks but a line that goes throughout all of the blocks, the image is stored as formulas and mathematical equations. One reason to use a bitmap file over a vector is a bitmap image file can be more complex than a vector file without losing any of it's size, the reason for this is that a vector file cannot accurately show the change from one colour to another, another reason is that it has a much higher processing speed, lastly a bitmap file is well suited to the newest and best input and output devices such as, phones, digital cameras and modern monitors. So the images can be much more complex with a higher speed and is well supported by the newest technology, so why would you want to go with a vector file type? Well some of the weaknesses with bitmaps are caused by it's strengths, due to it being a more fast method of processing images it doesn't condense the image and make it more refined meaning the file sizes are far larger than they need to be, another problem is that the image cannot be scaled perfectly, this means when you enlarge the image it will lose it's quality and therefore look much worse. The advantages of using vector images is that a vector image file can be much smaller and what is in the pictures doesn't make much of an impact on the size, another good reason to use vector files is that because information about the image is stored in text, the image can be made larger and larger and not lose any of it's previous quality, you can also rotate the image and tweak parts of it without reducing the quality. Some of the disadvantages to vector is that it is much easier to convert a vector image into a bitmap raster image than converting a bitmap into a raster image, doing this takes up quite a lot of time as the software has to effectively recreate the image adding the inter connected line throughout all of the blocks, it also does not retain all of it's previous quality. In regards to which one is better, they are both well suited at their own tasks, bitmap raster images are good for quick and easy images that you aren't going to do too much editing or scaling too, and vector images are good for images you are going to be doing lots of scaling on or if you want to guarantee an image will look very good.

Types of Bitmap image and what they are best suited for.

JPG

A JPG is an image best suited for going on a website or to go on college work for example, they are also very good for being printed at a high resolution and, depending on the printer, keep most of it's high quality. They have a relatively small size and can be downloaded at a rapid pace, they are also good for quick and light editing due to their good quality. However, jpeg's do not and cannot have a transparent background, they must have a solid colour as it's background.