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Understanding digital
images
What are digital images?
Digital images are electronic representations of images that are stored on a computer. The most
important thing to understand about digital images is that you cant see them and they dont
have any physical size until they are displayed on a screen or printed on paper. Until that point,
they are just a collection of numbers on the computers hard drive that describe the individual
elements of a picture and how they are arranged. These elements are called pixels (short for
picture elements), and they are arranged in a grid format with each pixel containing information
about its colour or intensity.
(Note: these guidelines concern raster images (sometimes known as bitmap images): images that are composed of
pixels. Most photo-realistic images are raster images. Another type of digital image is a vector image, which is
composed of lines and co-ordinates rather than dots and is more suited to line art, graphs or fonts. See
http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/creating/fileformat.html for more information about the difference between the two
types.)
Image Formats
There are four main file formats for images: TIFF, JPEG, PNG and GIF. The format of a
particular file is identified by the three letter file extension at the end of a filename (.tif, .jpg, .png,
and .gif respectively), and each format has unique characteristics that make it suitable for
particular uses. A brief explanation of each format is given below, together with its good and
bad points, as well as sources of further information.
Note: The image formats covered in this section are all 'raster' formats (images composed of pixels). Vector images
(images that are composed of lines and co-ordinates) are not covered by these guidelines, but you can follow the link
to the left for further information on vector file formats. The TASI web site has further details on vector file formats:
http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/vector/tl_vector1.html.
However, by choosing the level of compression that is used and you can control the file size
and quality of the resulting image: as a general rule, you can save at 70-80% quality without
noticing much degradation in image quality.
Further information
For more information on file formats, have a look at the following web resources:
o MS Office picture formats details of formats suitable to use in MS Office documents:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320314/en-us?spid=2530&sid=256
o TASI Choosing a file format http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/creating/format.html
o Scantips.com - Which Image File Format? http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html
File sizes
There are three main factors that determine the size of an image file: pixel dimensions; image
format; and colour depth.
Pixel dimensions
This refers to the number of pixels in an image: the more pixels that are present, the larger the
file size will be. Aim to have an image that is big enough for your purpose but no bigger, as the
extra pixel information will not be needed and will only slow down your software. For example, if
you wish to show an image in a PowerPoint presentation slide, there is no point in using an
image that is larger than 1024 x 768 pixels, as this is the usual size of most computer and
projector screens. Similarly, if you wish to show two images on one slide, each image should
only be a maximum of 500 x 768 pixels. Even when you resize or crop an image within
PowerPoint or Word, the original image information is still retained so although the image
appears smaller, it still takes up the same amount of memory. See Using Images in
PowerPoint for more information on resizing images and reducing file sizes. For information on
sotware you can use to resize images, look at Modifying Images.
Image format
The format of an image file has a large effect on the file size. As discussed earlier, TIFF files are
uncompressed and so file sizes are large, whereas JPEG files are compressed, resulting in
smaller file sizes, depending on the amount of compression applied. For example, a screen
sized TIFF file that is 2 Mb in size reduces to a mere 400 Kb when saved as a high quality
JPEG a fifth of the original file size.
Converting from one format to another can easily be done using any image editing software:
see the section on Editing Images to find suggestions for suitable software.