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Unit
Image/ Photo

Objectives:
Manipulation 3
At the end of the unit, the student must have:
• discussed how to work out graphical approach, organizing tools and configuring
computer workspace;
• differentiated among bitmap, vector and 3-D images and describe the
capabilities and limitations of all three.
• described the use of colors and palettes in multimedia
• cited the various image file types used in multimedia.
• examined software and tools in photo manipulation

1.1 Introduction
Multimedia on a computer screen is a composite of elements: text, symbols, photograph
like bitmaps, vector-drawn graphics, three-dimensional renderings, distinctive buttons to click,
and windows of motion video. Some parts of this image may even twitch or move so that the
screen never seems still and tempts your eye. It may be a very colorful screen with gentle
pastel washes of mauve and puce, or it may be brutally primary with splashes of Crayola red
and blue and yellow and green. It might be stark black and white, full of sharp angles, or
softened with gray-scale blends and anti-aliasing. It may be elegant or, by design, not. The
computer screen is where the action is, and it contains much more than your message; it is
also the viewer’s primary connection to all of your project’s content.
This chapter will help you understand the visual elements that make up a multimedia
presentation. Graphic elements can usually be scaled to different sizes, colorized or patterned
or made transparent, placed in front of or behind other objects, or be made visible or invisible
on command. How you blend these elements, how you choose your colors and fonts, the tricks
that you use to catch the eye, how adept you are at using your tools—these are the hallmarks
of your skill, talent, knowledge, and creativity coalesced into the all-important visual connection
to your viewers.

1.2 Before you Start to Create

At the beginning of a project, the screen is a blank canvas, ready for you, the
multimedia designer, to express your craft. The screen will change again and again during the
course of your project as you experiment, as you stretch and reshape elements, draw new
objects and throw out old ones, and test various colors and effects—creating the vehicle for
your message. Indeed, many multimedia designers are known to experience a mild shiver when
they pull down the New menu and draw their first colors onto a fresh screen. Just so; this
screen represents a powerful and seductive avenue
for channeling creativity.
WARNING Multimedia designers are regularly lured into agonizingly steep learning curves, long
nights of cerebral problem solving, and the pursuit of performance perfection. If you are fundamentally
creative, multimedia may become a calling, not a profession.

3.2.1 Plan Your Approach

Whether you use templates and ready-made screens provided by your authoring system, clip art
or objects crafted by others, or even if you simply clone the look and feel of another project—
there will always be a starting point where your page is “clean.” But even before reaching this
starting point, be sure you have given your project a good deal of thought and planning.
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Work out your graphic approach, either in your head or during creative sessions with your client or
colleagues. There are strong arguments against drawing on a fresh screen without such foresight and
preparation. To get a handle on any multimedia project, you start with pencil, eraser, and paper.
Outline your project and your graphic ideas first: make a flowchart; storyboard the project using stick
figures; use three-by-five index cards and shuffle them until you get it right.
You may not “nail it” with the first design you submit to a client. Get a few examples from
them or have them look at templates from a site such as www.templatemonster.com. When you have
a clear idea what they want, submit a few variations—different visual designs, color palettes, and
layouts.

1.2.2 Organize Your Tools

Most authoring systems provide the tools with which you can create the graphic objects of
multimedia (text, interactive buttons, vector-drawn objects, and bitmaps) directly on your screen. If one
of these tools is not included, the authoring system usually offers a mechanism for importing the
object you need from another application. When you are working with animated objects or motion
video, most authoring systems include a feature for activating these elements, such as a programming
language or special functions for embedding them. Likely, too, your tools will offer a library of special
effects—including zooms, wipes, and dissolves. Many multimedia designers do not limit their toolkits to
the features of a single authoring platform, but employ a variety of applications and tools to
accomplish many specialized tasks.

1.2.3 Configure your Computer Workspace

When developing multimedia, it is helpful to have more than one monitor to provide lots of
screen real estate (viewing area). In this way, you can display the full-screen working area of your
project or presentation and still have space to put your tools and other menus. This is particularly
important in an authoring system such as Flash or Director, where the edits and changes you make in
one window are immediately visible in the presentation window—provided the presentation window is
not obscured by your editing tool! During development there is a lot of cutting and pasting among
windows and among various applications, and with an extra monitor, you can open many windows at
once and spread them out. Both Macintosh and Windows operating systems support this extra
hardware.

3.3 Making Still Images

Still images may be small or large, or even full screen. They may be colored, placed at
random on the screen, evenly geometric, or oddly shaped. Still images may be a single tree on a
wintry hillside; stacked boxes of text against a gray, tartan, or Italian marble background; an
engineering drawing; a snapshot of your department manager’s new BMW. Whatever their form, still
images are generated by the computer in two ways: as bitmaps (or paint graphics) and as vector-
drawn (or just plain “drawn”) graphics. Bitmaps may also be called “raster” images. Likewise, bitmap
editors are sometimes called “painting” programs. And vector editors are sometimes called “drawing”
programs.
Bitmaps are used for photo-realistic images and for complex drawings requiring fine detail.
Vector-drawn objects are used for lines, boxes, circles, polygons, and other graphic shapes that can
be mathematically expressed in angles, coordinates, and distances. A drawn object can be filled with
color and patterns, and you can select it as a single object. The appearance of both types of images
depends on the display resolution and capabilities of your computer’s graphics hardware and monitor.
Both types of images are stored in various file formats and can be translated from one application to
another or from one computer platform to another. Typically, image files are compressed to save
memory and disk space; many bitmap image file formats already use compression within the file
itself—for example, GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
Still images may be the most important element of your multimedia project or web site. If you
are designing multimedia by yourself, put yourself in the role of graphic artist and layout designer.
Take the time necessary to discover all the tricks you can learn about your drawing software.
Competent, computer-literate skills in graphic art and design are vital to the success of your project.

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Remember—more than anything else, the user’s judgment of your work will be heavily influenced by
the work’s visual impact.

1.3.1 Bitmaps
A bit is the simplest element in the digital world, an electronic digit that is either on or off,
black or white, or true (1) or false (0). This is referred to as binary, since only two states (on or off)
are available. A map is a two-dimensional matrix of these bits. A bitmap, then, is a simple matrix of
the tiny dots that form an image and are displayed on a computer screen or printed.
A one-dimensional matrix (1-bit depth) is used to display monochrome images—a bitmap where
each bit is most commonly set to black or white. Depending upon your software, any two colors that
represent the on and off (1 or 0) states may be used. More information is required to describe shades
of gray or the more than 16 million colors that each picture element might have in a color image, as
illustrated in Figure 3-1. These picture elements (known as pels or, more commonly, pixels) can be
either on or off, as in the 1-bit bitmap, or, by using more bits to describe them, can represent varying
shades of color (4 bits for 16 colors; 8 bits for 256 colors; 15 bits for 32,768 colors; 16 bits for 65,536
colors; 24 bits for 16,772,216 colors). Thus, with 2 bits, for example, the available zeros and ones can
be combined in only four possible ways and can, then, describe only four possible colors:

Together, the state of all the pixels on a computer screen make up the image seen by the
viewer, whether in combinations of black and white or colored pixels in a line of text, a photograph-
like picture, or a simple background pattern. Figure 3-2 demonstrates various color depths and
compression formats. Image 1 is 24 bits deep (millions of colors); Image 2 is dithered to 8 bits using
an adaptive palette (the best 256 colors to represent the image); Image 3 is also dithered to 8 bits,
but uses the Macintosh system palette (an optimized standard mix of 256 colors). Image 4 is dithered
to 4 bits (any 16 colors); Image 5 is dithered to 8-bit gray-scale (256 shades of gray); Image 6 is
dithered to 4-bit gray-scale (16 shades of gray); and Image 7 is dithered to 1 bit (two colors—in this
case, black and white).

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 3.3.1.1 Bitmap Sources

Where do bitmaps come

from? How are they
made? You can do the
following:
■ Make a bitmap from
scratch with a paint or
drawing program.
■ Grab a bitmap from an
active computer screen
with a screen capture
program, and then paste
it into a paint program
or your application.
■ Capture a bitmap from
a photo or other artwork
using a scanner to
digitize the image.
■ Once made, a bitmap
can be copied, altered,
e-mailed, and otherwise
used in many creative
ways.

If you do not want to

make your own, you can
get bitmaps from
suppliers of clip art, and
from photograph
suppliers who have
already digitized the
images for you. Libraries
of clip art are available
on CD-ROMs and
downloadable through
online services. Many
graphics applications are
shipped with clip art and
useful graphics. A clip art
collection may contain a
random assortment of
images, or it may contain
a series of graphics,
photographs, sound, and
video related to a single
topic. Some 3-D modeling
programs incorporate
libraries of pre-made 3-D
models into the
application, allowing you
to drag and drop
common objects into a
scene.
You can also download an image bitmap from a web site: in most browsers right-click over the image
to see a menu of options. Choose “Download image to disk,” “Copy Image,” or “Save picture as….”
Regardless

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of the source of the image, you should be aware of who owns the copyright to the image you wish to
use and what is required to reproduce the image legally.
WARNING To avoid legal problems, always assume that an image on the Web is protected by copyright,
even if there is no copyright notice shown. Just because you can easily download an image from a web site,
doesn’t mean that you can reuse that image in your own work without permission or paying a license fee.

Legal rights protecting use of images from clip libraries fall into three basic groupings. Public
domain images were either never protected by a copyright or their copyright protection has ended.
Generally these can be freely used without obtaining permission or paying a license fee, though there
still may be an ownership issue for a particular work of art (such as a painting owned by an art
gallery). Royalty-free images are purchased and then used without paying additional license fees.
Rights-managed images require that you negotiate with the rights holder regarding terms for using
the image and how much you will pay for that use.
Figure 3-3 shows a page of thumbnails describing a commercially available resource of royalty-
free images called Photodisc, a part of Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com). The Photodisc
collections contain high-resolution bitmaps with a license for their “unlimited use.” But you should note
that “unlimited use” often contains caveats: in many cases there is an upper limit to the number of
“units” of your own product that you may distribute without paying more, so you need to read the fine
print. These additional fees are usually reasonable, however, and affect only commercial multimedia
publishers.

Regardless of the source, once you have a bitmap, you can manipulate and adjust many of its
properties (such as brightness, contrast, color depth, hue, and size). You can also cut and paste
among many bitmaps using an image-editing program. If the clip art image is high resolution (aimed
at 300 or 600 dpi printers, not 72 dpi monitors), you may discover that you can grab just a tiny
portion of the high-res image—say, a sheep in the far corner of a farmyard or a car in a parking
lot—and it will look great when displayed at monitor resolution.

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 3.3.1.2 Bitmap Software

The abilities and features of painting and image-editing programs range from simple to
complex. The best programs are available in versions that work the same on both Windows and Mac
platforms, and the graphics files you make can be saved in many formats, readable across platforms.
Macintosh computers do not ship with a painting tool, and Windows provides only a
rudimentary Paint program, so you will need to acquire this very important software separately. Many
multimedia authoring tools offer built-in bitmap editing features. Director, for example, includes a
powerful image editor that provides advanced tools such as “onion-skinning” and image filtering using
common plug-ins. Adobe’s Photoshop, however, remains the most widely used image-editing tool
among designers worldwide; it is available without some bells and whistles in a less-expensive version,
Photoshop Elements, which may have all the features you need for your projects.
Many designers also use a vector-based drawing program such as Adobe’s Illustrator,
CorelDRAW, or InDesign to create curvy and complicated looks that they then convert to a bitmap.
You can use your image editing software to create original images, such as cartoons, symbols,
buttons, bitmapped text, and abstract images that have a refined “graphic” look, but it is virtually
impossible to create a realistic-looking photo from scratch using an image-editing program. The artistic
painting tools offered by Corel’s Painter (www.corel.com/painter) include hundreds of brushes, sprays,
watercolors, inks, and textures to mimic the output of natural media in a bitmap. There are also many
open source and free bitmap editors available—just type “graphics editors” in a search engine.
Regardless of your program of choice, learning to use a high-powered paint program and image
editor is a necessary investment in your multimedia future.

Capturing and Editing Images The image you see on your monitor is a digital bitmap stored in
video memory, updated about every 1/60 of a second. As you assemble images for your multimedia
project, you may often need to capture and store an image directly from your screen. The simplest
way to capture what you see on the screen at any given moment is to press the proper keys on your
computer keyboard. This causes a conversion from the screen buffer to a format that you can use.
■ Both the Macintosh and Windows environments have a clipboard— an area of memory where data
such as text and images is temporarily stored when you cut or copy them within an application. In
Windows,
when you press print screen, a copy of your screen’s image goes to the clipboard. From the
clipboard, you can then paste the captured bitmap into an application (such as Paint, which comes
with Windows).
■ On the Macintosh, the keystroke combination command-shift-3 creates a readable PNG-format file
named Picture and places it on your desktop. You can then import this file’s image into your
multimedia
authoring system or paint program. You can also press command-control-shift-4 to drag a rectangle
on your screen and capture what is inside the rectangle onto the clipboard, ready for pasting.
The way to get more creative power when manipulating bitmaps
is to use an image-editing program, likely one of the programs named
previously. These are the king-of-the-mountain programs that let you not
only retouch the blemishes and details of photo images, but also do
tricks like placing an image of your own face at the helm of a square-
rigger or right on the sideline at last year’s Super Bowl. Figure 3-4
showsjust such a composite image, made from two photographs. It was
created by graphic artist Frank Zurbano and shows his fiancée, Brandy
Rowell, chasing after wedding gifts on the lawn where they will be
married. Isolating and extracting parts of an image is an essential skill in
multimedia production. Most bitmap editors have “lasso” type tools that
select areas by drawing a path. This selection can be “feathered,”
or made to include partially transparent pixels outside the selected area.

Figure 3-4 Image-editing

programs let you add and
delete elements in layers.

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 In addition to letting you enhance and
make composite images, image-editing tools
allow you to alter and distort images. A color
photograph of a red rose can be changed
into a purple rose, or blue if you prefer. A
small child standing next to her older brother
can be “stretched” to tower over him.
Morphing is another effect that can be zused
to manipulate still images or to create
interesting and often bizarre animated
transformations. Morphing (see Figure 3-5)
allows you to smoothly blend
two images so that one image seems to melt
into the next, often producing some amusing
results. Figure 3-5 Morphing software was used to seamlessly
transform the images of 16 kindergartners. When a sound
Scanning Images After poring through track of music and voices was added to the four-minute piece,
it made a compelling video about how similar children are to
countless clip art collections, you still haven’t each other.
found the unusual background you want for a
screen about gardening. Sometimes when you search for something too hard, you don’t realize that
it’s right in front of you. Everyday objects can be scanned and manipulated using image-editing tools,
such as those described in the preceding section, to create unusual, attention-getting effects. For
example, to enliven a screen with a gardening motif, scan a mixture of seeds, some fall foliage, or grass-
stained garden gloves. Open the scan in an image-editing program and experiment with different filters, the
contrast, and various special effects. Be creative, and don’t be afraid to try strange combinations—
sometimes mistakes yield the most intriguing results. Another alternative to computer-generated graphics
is to create artwork using traditional methods: watercolors, pastels, and even crayons. You can then scan
the image, make necessary alterations, and tweak pixels on the computer. Too many designers have fallen
into the trap of trying to draw detailed sketches using a mouse or drawing tablet, when a pencil or
pen on paper would have produced better results quicker.
Powerful filters and plug-ins are offered by most image-editing programs (see illustration to right) to
manipulate bitmaps in many different ways. Experiment with your filters and plug-ins. Alien Skin’s
Exposure, for example, brings the creative tools of film photography to the world of digital editing with
presets for many looks: discontinued films, darkroom tricks, lo-fi camera quirks like Holga and Lomo,
vintage looks like Technicolor movie film and old Kodachrome that are distressed with dust, scratches, and
lens blur, warped vignettes, and funky colors from cross-processing (see Figure 3-6).

Figure 3-6 Exposure from

Alien Skin, offering
photography effects, is one
of hundreds of commercial
plug-ins and filters available
for manipulating bitmapped
images. Here a digital color
image has been processed
to look like it came from a
photographer’s darkroom.

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 3.3.2 Vector Drawing

Most multimedia authoring systems provide for use of vector-drawn objects such as lines,
rectangles, ovals, polygons, complex drawings created from those objects, and text.
■ Computer-aided design (CAD) programs have traditionally used vector-drawn object systems for
creating the highly complex and geometric renderings needed by architects and engineers.
■ Graphic artists designing for print media use vector-drawn objects because the same mathematics
that put a rectangle on your screen can also place that rectangle (or the fancy curves of a good line-
art illustration) on paper without jaggies. This requires the higher resolution of the printer, using a
page description format such as Portable Document Format (PDF).
■ Programs for 3-D animation also use vector-drawn graphics. For example, the various changes of
position, rotation, and shading of light required to spin an extruded corporate logo must be calculated
mathematically.

3.3.2.1 How Vector Drawing Works

A vector is a line that is described by the location of its two endpoints. Vector drawing uses
Cartesian coordinates where a pair of numbers describes a point in two-dimensional space as the
intersection of horizontal and vertical lines (the x and y axes). The numbers are always listed in the
order x,y. In three-dimensional space, a third dimension—depth— is described by a z axis (x,y,z). This
coordinate system is named for the French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes. So a line
might be simply
<line x1="0" y1="0" x2="200" y2="100">
where x1 and y1 define the starting point (in the upper-left corner of the viewing box) and x2 and y2
define the end point.
A simple rectangle is computed from starting point and size: your software will draw a
rectangle (rect) starting at the upper-left corner of your viewing area (0,0) and going 200 pixels
horizontally to the right and 100 pixels downward to mark the opposite corner. Add color information
like
<rect x="0" y="0" width="200" height="100" fill="#FFFFFF" stroke="#FF0000"/>
and your software will draw the rectangle with a red boundary line and fill it with the color white. You
can, of course, add other parameters to describe a fill pattern or the width of the boundary line.
Circles are defined by a location and a radius:
<circle cx="50" cy="50" r="10" fill="none" stroke="#000000" />
Type the following code into a text editor and save it as plain text with
a .svg extension. This is a Scalable Vector Graphics file. Open it in an
HTML5-capable browser (File:Open File…) and you will see:
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
width="200"
height="200"
viewBox="-100 -100 300 300">
<rect x="0" y="0" fill="yellow" stroke="red" width="200" height="100"/>
<text transform="matrix(1 0 0 1 60 60)" font-family="'TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT'" font-
size="36">SVG</text>
</svg>
Because these SVG files can be saved in a small amount of memory and because they are scalable
without distortion (try changing the width and height of the view box in the preceding code), SVG
(Tiny) is supported by browsers on most mobile phones and PDAs. The SVG specification also
includes time-based changes or animations that can be embedded within the image code (see
www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/animate. html#AnimationElements). Adobe Illustrator saving a file in SVG format.
Vector drawing tools use Bézier curves or paths to mathematically represent a curve. In practical
terms, editing software shows you points on the path, each point having a “handle.” Changing the
location of the handle changes the shape of the curve. Mastering Bézier curves is an important skill:
these curves not only create graphic shapes but represent motion paths when creating animations

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 3.3.2.2 Vector-Drawn Object vs Bitmaps

Vector-drawn objects are described and drawn to the computer screen using a fraction of the
memory space required to describe and store the same object in bitmap form. The file containing the
vector-drawn colored rectangle described in the preceding section is less than 698 bytes of
alphanumeric data (even less—468 bytes—when the description is tokenized or compressed as .svgz).
On the other hand, the same rectangle saved as a .gif image with a 64-color palette takes 1,100
bytes.
Because of this file size advantage, web pages that use vector graphics as SVG files or in
plug-ins such as Flash download faster and, when used for animation, draw faster than pages
displaying bitmaps. It is only when you draw many hundreds of objects on your screen that you may
experience a slowdown while you wait for the screen to be refreshed—the size, ocation, and other
properties for each of the objects must be computed. Thus, a single image made up of 500 individual
line and rectangle objects, for example, may take longer for the computer to process and place on
the screen than an image consisting of just a few drawn circle objects.
A vector-drawn object is created “on the fly,” that is, the computer draws the image from the
instructions it has been given, rather than displaying a pre-created image. This means that vector
objects are easily scalable without loss of resolution or image quality. A large drawn image can be
shrunk to the size of a postage stamp, and while it may not look good on a computer monitor at 72
dpi, it may look great when printed at 300 dpi to a color printer. Resizing a bitmapped image requires
either duplicating pixels (creating a blocky, jagged look called pixelation) or throwing pixels away
(eliminating details). Because vector images are drawn from instructions on the fly, a rescaled image
retains the quality of the original.

1.3.2 3-D Drawing and Rendering

Drawing in perspective or in 3-D on a two-dimensional surface takes special skill and talent.
Creating objects in three dimensions on a computer screen can be difficult for designers comfortable
with squares, circles, and other x (width) and y (height) geometries on a two-dimensional screen.
Dedicated software is available to help you render three-dimensional scenes, complete with directional
lighting and special effects, but be prepared for late nights and steep learning curves as you become
familiar with nurbs, deformations, mesh generations, and skinning! From making 3-D text to creating
detailed walkthroughs of 3-D space, each application will demand study and practice before you are
efficient and comfortable with its feature set and power.
The production values of multimedia projects have increased dramatically, and as the
production bar has risen, end users’ expectations have also ratcheted upward. The multimedia
production bar moves like a high jump or pole vault contest—as each new project improves on the
last, competitors must jump to meet the new, higher standard. Flat and colorless 2-D screens are no
longer sufficient for a successful commercial multimedia project. 3-D-rendered graphic art and
animation has become commonplace since the late 1980s, providing more lifelike substance and feel to
projects. Luckily, in an arena where only high-powered workstations could supply the raw computing
horsepower for effective 3-D designing, inexpensive desktop PCs and excellent software have made 3-
D modeling attainable by most multimedia developers.
Today many products—including Daz3D (www.daz3d.com) and form•Z (www.formz.com)—are
touted as essential tools for illustration, animation, and multimedia production. NewTek’s Lightwave
(www.newtek.com/lightwave) and Autodesk’s Maya (www.autodesk.com/ Maya) are industry-standard,
high-end animation programs used for everything from multimedia programs and game designs to
special effects in films and even feature-length movies. For experimenting with 3-D, Google’s
SketchUp (sketchup.google.com) provides a simple (and free) cross-platform tool. To delve deeply into
3-D, the open-source Blender (www.blender.org) is a powerful tool—but its complex interface presents
a steep learning curve.
For 3-D, the depth (z dimension) of cubes and spheres must be calculated and displayed so
that the perspective of the rendered object seems correct to the eye. Most 3-D software packages
provide adjustable views so that you can see your work from the top, bottom, or sides.

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 A great deal of information is needed to display a 3-D scene.
Scenes consist of objects that in turn contain many small elements such
as blocks, cylinders, spheres, or cones (described using mathematical
constructs or formulas). The more elements contained in an object, the
more complicated its structure will be and, usually, the finer its resolution
and smoothness.
Objects and elements in 3-D space carry with them properties
such as shape, color, texture, shading, and location. A scene contains
many different objects. Imagine a scene with a table, chairs, and a
background. Zoom into one of the objects—the chair, for example, in
Figure 3-7. It has 11 objects made up of various blocks and rectangles.
Objects are created by modeling them using a 3-D application.
Figure 3-7 A chair modeled
To model an object that you want to place into your scene, you must in 3-D is made up of
start with a shape. You can create a shape from scratch, or you can various blocks and
import a previously made shape from a library of geometric shapes called rectangles.
primitives, typically blocks, cylinders, spheres, and cones. In most 3-D
applications, you can create any 2-D shape with a drawing tool or place the outline of a letter, then
extrude or lathe it into the third dimension along the z axis (see Figure 3-8). When you extrude a
plane surface, its shape extends some distance, either perpendicular to the shape’s outline or along a
defined path. When you lathe a shape, a profile of the shape is rotated around a defined axis (you
can set the direction) to create the 3-D object. Other methods for creating 3-D objects differ among
the various software packages.
Once you have created a 3-D object, you can apply textures and colors to it to make it seem
more realistic, whether rough and coarse or
shiny and smooth. You can also apply a color
or pattern, or even a bitmapped picture, to
texture your object. Thus you can build a table,
apply an oak finish, and then stain it purple or
blue or iridescent yellow. You can add coffee
cup rings and spilled cheese dip with
appropriate coloring and texturing. To model a
scene, you place all of your objects into 3-D
space. Some complex scenes may contain
hundreds (if not thousands) of elements. In
modeling your scene, you can also set up one
or more lights that will create diffuse or sharp
shades and shadows on your objects and will
also reflect, or flare, where the light is most
intense. Then you can add a background and
set a camera view, the location and
angle from which you will view thefinal
Figure 3-8 A free-form object created by extrusion and a wine
flute created by lathing rendered scene.
Shading can usually be applied in
several ways. Flat shading (b) is the
fastest for the computer to render and is most often used in preview mode. Gouraud shading ( a),
Phong shading (d), and ray tracing (c) take longer to render but provide photo-realistic images.
When you have completed the modeling of your scene or an object in it, you then must render it for
final output. Rendering is when the computer finally uses intricate algorithms to apply the effects you
have specified on the objects you have created. Figure 3-9 shows a background, an object, and the
rendered composite. Rendering an image requires great computing muscle and often takes many
hours for a single image, and you will feel the strength (or weakness) of your hardware. Indeed, some
multimedia and animation companies dedicate certain computers solely for rendering. The final images
for the classic animated movie Toy Story were rendered on a “farm” of 87 dual-processor and 30
quad-processor 100 MHz SPARCstation 20s. It took 46 days of continuous processing to render that
film’s 110,000 frames at a rate of about one frame every one to three hours.

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 3.3.2.1 Panoramas
Media players such as QuickTime and
RealPlayer let you view a single surrounding
image as if you were “inside” the picture
and able to look up or down, turn, or zoom
in on features. To make this work, you
need to stitch together many images taken
from different angles around a circle.
Software such as ULead COOL 360
www.ulead.com/cool360) or Panorama
Factory (www.panoramafactory.com) works
by importing a sequence of photos and
letting you adjust them precisely into a
single seamless bitmap, where the right
edge attaches to the left edge and the
color and lighting differences among the
image are smoothed. You should allow
some overlap when you take each photo
for a 360-degree panorama, and you may
need to adjust each photo’s contrast,
brightness, hue, and saturation while
stitching, if that feature is not provided by
your software. Most programs also allow
you to adjust perspective to compensate for
different focal lengths or camera heights.

3.3 Color
Color is a vital component of multimedia.
The next few sections explain
where color comes from and how colors
are displayed on a computer monitor.
Management of color is both a subjective
and a technical exercise. Picking
the right colors and combinations of colors
for your project can involve
many tries until you feel the result is right.
But the technical description of
a color may be expressed in known
physical values (humans, for example,
perceive colors with wavelengths ranging
from 400 to 600 nanometers on
the electromagnetic spectrum), and several
methods and models describe
Figure 3-9 A background and object rendered into an image with color space using mathematics and
shadows and lighting effects values

3.3.1 Understanding Natural

Light and Color
Light comes from an atom when an electron passes from a higher to a lower energy level; thus
each atom produces uniquely specific colors. This explanation of light, known as the quantum theory,
was developed by physicist Max Planck in the late 19th century. Niels Bohr, another physicist, later
showed that an excited atom that has absorbed energy and whose electrons have moved into higher
orbits will throw off that energy in the form of quanta, or photons, when it reverts to a stable state.
This is where light comes from.
Color is the frequency of a light wave within the narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum to
which the human eye responds. The letters of the mnemonic ROY G. BIV, learned by many of us to
12
remember the colors of the rainbow, are the ascending frequencies of the visible light spectrum: red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Light that is infrared, or below the frequency of red
light and not perceivable by the human eye, can be created and viewed by electronic diodes and
sensors, and it is used for TV and VCR remote controls, for wireless communications among
computers, and for night goggles used in the military. Infrared light is radiated heat. Ultraviolet light,
on the other hand, is beyond the higher end of the visible spectrum and can be damaging to
humans.
The color white is a noisy mixture of all the color frequencies in the visible spectrum. Sunlight
and fluorescent tubes produce white light (though, technically, even they vary in color temperature—
sunlight isaffected by the angle at which the light is coming through the atmosphere, and fluorescent
tubes provide spikes in the blue-green parts of the color spectrum); tungsten lamp filaments produce
light with a yellowish cast; sodium vapor lamps, typically used for low-cost outdoor street lighting,
produce an orange light characteristic of the sodium atom. These are the most common sources of
light in the everyday (or every night) world. The light these sources produce typically reaches your eye
as a reflection of that light into the lens of your eye.
The cornea of the eye acts as a lens to focus light rays onto the retina. The light rays
stimulate many thousands of specialized nerves, called rods, which cover the surface of the retina.
Receptors in the cones are sensitive to red, green, and blue light, and all the nerves together transmit
the pattern of color information to the brain. The eye can differentiate among about 80,000 colors, or
hues, consisting of combinations of red, green, and blue.
As color information is sent to the brain, other parts of the mind massage the data en route
to its point of cognitive recognition. Human response to color is complicated by cultural and
experiential filters that cause otherwise straightforward color frequencies to carry pleasant, unpleasant,
soothing, depressing, and many other special meanings. In Western cultures, for example, red is the
color of anger and danger; in Eastern cultures, red is the color of happiness. Red is the traditional
color for Chinese restaurant motifs, to make them attractive and happy places; Western restaurants
are often decorated in quieter pastels and earth tones. White, not black, is the color of funerals in
Chinese culture.
Green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, pink, brown, black, gray, and white are the ten most
common color-describing words used in all human languages and cultures. Komar and Melamid’s
interesting tongue-in-cheek Internet study (www.diacenter.org/km/index.html) has determined that the
favorite color in the world is blue.

3.3.2 Computerized Color

Because the eye’s receptors are sensitive to red, green, and blue light, by adjusting
combinations of these three colors, the eye and brain will interpolate the combinations of colors in
between. This is the psychology, not the physics, of color: what you perceive as orange on a
computer monitor is a combination of two frequencies of green and red light, not the actual spectral
frequency you see when you look at that namesake fruit, an orange, in sunlight. Although the eye
perceives colors based upon red, green, and blue, there are actually two basic methods of making
color: additive and subtractive.

3.3.2.1 Additive Color

In the additive color method, a color is created by
combining colored light sources in three primary colors: red,
green, and blue (RGB). This is the process used for
cathode ray tube (CRT), liquid crystal (LCD), and plasma
displays. On the back of the glass face of a CRT are
thousands of phosphorescing chemical dots. These dots are
each about 0.30mm or less in diameter (the dot pitch), and
are positioned very carefully and very close together,
arranged in triads of red, green, and blue. These dots are
bombarded by electrons that “paint” the screen at high
speeds (about 60 times a second). The red, green, and
blue dots light up when hit by the electron beam. Your eye sees the combination of red, green, and
blue light and interpolates it to create all other colors. Like CRTs, LCD and plasma screens utilize tiny

13
red, green, and blue elements energized through tiny transparent conductors and organized in a
Cartesian grid as illustrated by
Marvin Raaijmakers and Angelo La Spina:

3.3.2.2 Subtractive Color

In the subtractive color method, color is created by combining colored media such as paints or
ink that absorb (or subtract) some parts of the color spectrum of light and reflect the others back to
the eye. Subtractive color is the process used to create color in printing. The printed page is made up
of tiny halftone dots of three primary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow (designated as CMY). Four-
color printing includes black (which is technically not a color but, rather, the absence of color). Since
the letter B is already used for blue, black is designated with a K (so four-color printing is designated
as CMYK). The color remaining in the reflected part of the light that reaches your eye from the
printed page is the color you perceive.
All these factors make computerized color pretty tricky to manage. The fact that a paint
program uses RGB to create the colors on your monitor, while your printer uses CMYK to print out
your image, explains the problem of matching what you see on the screen with your printout. High-
end image-editing programs such as Photoshop deal with this problem by allowing you to calibrate
your monitor with your printer.
The following chart shows the three primary additive colors and how, when one of the primary
colors is subtracted from this RGB mix, the subtractive primary color is perceived. The numbers in
parentheses indicate the amount of red, green, and blue (in that order) used to create each of the
colors in 24-bit color, which is described in the next section. A zero indicates a lack of that primary
color, while 255 is the maximum amount of that color.

3.3.2.3 Computer Color Models

Models or methodologies used to specify colors in computer terms are RGB, HSB, HSL, CMYK,
CIE, and others. Using the 24-bit RGB (red, green, blue) model, you specify a color by setting each
amount of red, green, and blue to a value in a range of 256 choices, from 0 to 255. Eight bits of
memory are required to define those 256 possible choices, and that has to be done for each of the
three primary colors; a total of 24 bits of memory (8 + 8 + 8 = 24) are therefore needed to describe
the exact color, which is one of “millions” (256 × 256 × 256 = 16,777,216). When web browsers were
first developed, the software engineers chose to represent the color amounts for each color channel in
a hexadecimal pair. Rather than using one number between 0 and 255, two hexadecimal numbers,
14
written in a scale of 16 numbers and letters in the range “0123456789ABCDEF” represent the required
8 bits (16 × 16 = 256) needed to specify the intensity of red, green, and blue. Thus, in HTML, you can
specify pure green as #00FF00, where there is no red (first pair is #00), there is maximum green
(second pair is #FF), and there is no blue (last pair is #00). The number sign (#) specifies the value
as hexadecimal.

In the HSB (hue, saturation, brightness) and HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) models, you
specify hue or color as an angle from 0 to 360 degrees on a color wheel, and saturation, brightness,
and lightness as percentages. Saturation is the
intensity of a color. At 100 percent saturation a
color is pure; at 0 percent saturation, the color is
white, black, or gray. Lightness or brightness is the
percentage of black or white that is mixed with a
color. A lightness of 100 percent will yield a white
color; 0 percent is black; the pure color has a 50
percent lightness.
The CMYK color model is less applicable to
multimedia production. It is used primarily in the
printing trade where cyan, magenta, yellow, and
black are used to print process color separations.

Other color models include CIE, YIQ, YUV, and YCC. CIE describes color values in terms of
frequency, saturation, and illuminance (blue/yellow or red/green, which in turn corresponds to the color
receptors in the cones of the eye). CIE more closely resembles how human beings perceive color, but
certain devices such as scanners are unable to replicate the process.
YIQ and YUV were developed for broadcast TV (composite NTSC). They are based on
luminance and chrominance expressed as the amplitude of a wave and the phase of the wave
relative to some reference. Detail is carried by luminance (black and white), so reduction in color does
not result in the loss of image definition detail. This analog process can be translated to a number
value so that the computer can use a palette to assign a color to a pixel.
The Photo YCC model has been developed by Kodak to provide a definition that enables
consistent representation of digital color images from negatives, slides, and other high-quality input.
YCC is used for PhotoCD images.

1.3.3 Color Palettes

Palettes are mathematical tables that define the color of a pixel displayed on the screen. The most common
palettes are
1, 4, 8, 16, and 24
bits deep:

15
 When color monitors became available for computers, managing the computations for
displaying colors severely taxed the hardware and memory available at the time. 256-color, 8-bit
images using a color lookup table or palette were the best a computer could do. 256 default system
colors were statistically selected by Apple and Microsoft engineers (working independently) to be the
colors and shades that are most “popular” in photographic images; their two system palettes are, of
course, different. Web authorities also decided on a palette of 216 “web-safe” colors that would allow
browsers to display images properly on both Macintosh and Windows computers.
GIF files using 256-color palettes are saved in a lossless format. The PNG format also uses
palettes (24-bits or 32 bits if an “alpha” mask is included for transparency), and is lossless. It was
developed for the Internet (it supports only the RGB color space) to expand GIF’s limited 256 colors
to millions of colors.
In 24-bit color systems, your computer works with three channels of 256 discrete shades of
each color (red, green, and blue) represented as the three axes of a cube. This allows a total of
16,777,216 colors (256 × 256 × 256). Just as the 44.1 kHz sampled-sound standard for CD music on
compact discs that is discussed in Chapter 4 covers the range of human hearing, the color range
offered by 24-bit systems covers what the human eye can sense.
1.3.3.1 Dithering
If you start out with a 24-bit scanned image that contains millions of colors and need to
reduce it to an 8-bit, 256-color image, you get the best replication of the original image by dithering
the colors in the image. Dithering is a process whereby the color value of each pixel is changed to
the closest matching color value in the target palette, using a mathematical algorithm. Often the
adjacent pixels are also examined, and patterns of different colors are created in the more limited
palette to best represent the original colors. Since there are now only 256 colors available to
represent the thousands or even millions of colors in the
original image, pixels using the 256 remaining colors are intermixed and the eye perceives a color not
in the palette, created by blending the colors mixed together. Thus any given pixel might not be
mapped to its closest palette entry, but instead to the average over some area of the image; this
average will be closer to the correct color than a substitute color would be. How well the dithered
image renders a good approximation of the original depends upon the algorithm used and whether
you allow the image-editing program to select the best set of 256 colors from the original image
(called an adaptive palette) or force it to use a predetermined set of 256 colors (as, for example, with
a System palette or the browser-safe web palette).
Dithering concepts are important to understand when you are working with bitmaps derived
from RGB information or based upon different palettes. The palette for the image of a rose, for
example, may contain mostly shades of red with a number of greens thrown in for the stem and
leaves. The image of your pretty Delft vase, into which you want to electronically place the rose, may
be mostly blues and grays. Your software will use a dithering algorithm to find the 256 color shades
that best represent both images, generating a new palette in the process.
Dithering software is usually built into image-editing programs and is also available in many
multimedia authoring systems as part of the application’s palette management suite of tools.

3.4 Image File Formats

Most applications on any operating system can manage JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF image
formats. An older format used on the Macintosh, PICT, is a complicated but versatile format
developed by Apple where both bitmaps and vector-drawn objects can live side by side. The device-
independent bitmap (DIB), also known as a BMP, is a common Windows palette–based image file
16
format similar to PNG. PCX files were originally developed for use in Z-Soft MS-DOS paint packages;
hese files can be opened and saved by almost all MS-DOS paint software and desktop publishing
software. TIFF, or Tagged Interchange File Format, was designed to be a universal bitmapped image
format and is also used extensively in desktop publishing packages. Often, applications use a
proprietary file format to store their images. Adobe creates a PSD file for Photoshop and an AI file
for Illustrator; Corel creates a CDR file. DXF was developed by AutoDesk as an ASCII-based drawing
interchange file for AutoCAD, but the format is used today by many computer-aided design
applications. IGS (or IGES, for Initial Graphics Exchange Standard) was developed by an industry
committee as a broader standard for transferring CAD drawings. These formats are also
used in 3-D rendering and animation programs.
JPEG, PNG, and GIF images are the most common bitmap formats used on the Web and
may be considered cross-platform, as all browsers will display them. Adobe’s popular PDF (Portable
Document File) file manages both bitmaps and drawn art (as well as text and other multimedia
content), and is commonly used to deliver a “finished product” that contains multiple assets.

3.5 Photo Manipulation

In the digital age, photo manipulation seems absolutely every day, yet it is a commonly
misunderstood and misrepresented topic. This article outlines the types of photo manipulation, its uses,
and what precisely it means for an image to be photo manipulated.

3.5.1 What is photo manipulation

Photo manipulation is the application of image editing techniques to photographs in order to
create an illusion or deception (in contrast to mere enhancement or correction), through analog or
digital means.

“Photo manipulation is the application of image editing techniques to photographs in order to

create an illusion or deception (in contrast to mere enhancement or correction), through analog or
digital means” – Definition from Webster’s Dictionary 2006 edition

3.5.1.1 Photoshopping

Photoshopping is a neologism for the digital editing of photos. The term originates from Adobe
Photoshop, the image editor most commonly used by professionals for this purpose; however, other
programs, such as Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photopaint, Pixelmator, Paint.NET, or GIMP, may be used.
Adobe Systems, the publisher of Adobe Photoshop, discourages use of the term "photoshop" as a
verb out of concern that it may undermine the company's trademark.

Despite this, photoshop is widely used as a verb, both colloquially and academically, to refer to
retouching, compositing (or splicing), and color balancing carried out in the course of graphic design,
commercial publishing, and image editing.

In popular culture, the term photoshopping is

sometimes associated with montages in the form of
visual jokes, such as those published on Fark and in
MAD Magazine. Images may be propagated
memetically via e-mail as humor or passed as actual
news in a
form of hoax.
An example of
the latter
category is
"Helicopter
Shark," which
was widely circulated as a so-called "National Geographic Photo of the Year" and was later revealed
to be a hoax.

17
 3.5.2 Tips and Tricks on Photo Manipulation for Beginners

The artwork in this set is originally uploaded and published in xyldrae.deviantart.com

containing the credits of stock images used.

Bear from happeningstock.deviantart.com/ | The lovely woman is my mom, from my wedding

pictures | Log from jellybellystock.deviantart.com/

18
Tip 1: You are doing it right now.

Reading tutorials is a good way to improve. Know however, that there is not one Tutorial that
will teach you everything. So you have to read specific tutorials on different subjects, such as
essentials, technical solutions (ex. what software to use or how to use specific tools in a
software), specific techniques (ex. lighting, toning, painting). This tutorial is one that aims to
help an aspiring photomanipulator to get a good glimpse of the essentials, assuming that one
is knowledgeable of the functions of the basic tools available in photo editing software’s.

Tip 2: Get stock images to create your idea or get your idea from stock images you see.

Stock photography is very under-rated. But it is one of the most beautiful arts ever. Herein,
stock photographers can manipulate a photomanipulator into doing what he wants to be
done with a stock image he/she took. Stock photos make up a final piece of
Photomanipulation. And if you begin from an idea to getting the stock required for that idea,
take your time in doing so, and know that it is just normal to sometimes spend more time
looking for the perfect stock than patching them up. One more thing, digital BRUSHES are
one of the best stocks ever!

Tip 3: Crop Cleanly and touch up the edges

A photo manipulation that is cropped lazily will easily be noticed as something unpleasant
even on a thumbnail view. So take time in cropping. Do not always rely on magic wand tools
or rely on feathering edges as if it really makes that object blend with the rest. It doesn’t do
that all the time. Sometimes, there are subjects with areas almost impossible to crop
perfectly, such as a person’s hair or the fur of an animal. A better way than just feathering
their edges or smudging them, is to paint over them and blend in.

Tip 4: The background is one thing. The Foreground is another thing.

Pre-made backgrounds save up time, but each time you use a background and leave it
untouched, this diminishes the originality and creativity of your work. On the other hand, have
fun in creating your own world starting with your background.

Tip 5: Toning is vital!

When you have this ‘new world’ which you want to populate with the subjects you desire,
you might want to adjust the color balance, brightness, contrast, curves etc. of every image
you put on it. Do not mistake putting a photo of a person taken in broad daylight into a
background that clearly depicts night time, unless that is your intention. Of course, you can
do the toning later on, after you have placed all your elements in the canvas. Sometimes, it
would suffice to just blend in a layer filled with the color (or gradient of the color/s) that
represent the hue you desire.

Tip 6: Before you merge layers, make sure you ’re done with the shadows and highlights, and
sometimes, reflections.

Lighting is a powerful thing! Shadows and Highlights give dimensions to a photograph. Unless
you want to create a one-dimensional piece, you need not concern yourself with shadows and
highlights. The direction of shadows is the same as the direction of the light. Identify first, the
light sources in your piece (or create them), and render the shadows they create. Take note,
every bit of matter affects the direction of light. Does your light touch a mirror? the let light
19
bounce accordingly. Is your light blocked by a tree? The tree puts a shade where it has
blocked the light.

The artwork in this set is originally uploaded and published in xyldrae.deviantart.com

containing the credits of stock images used.

Tip 7: Focus on the Focus!

Of course, your focus must be the sharpest and most defined area in your artwork. Know
that even sharpness in an image can have a fade-in or fade-out effect. This transition makes
one image gracefully blend in with another. Use the feather options from the selection tools
you use to apply fade effects.

Tip 8: Textures give a sense of feeling

Textures bring certain moods to your final photograph. Textures can be applied to a certain
area selections and to the whole image as a whole. Try out some textures but be careful in
deciding whether it is better to apply them or not.

Tip 9: Smudge, but not too much

Smudge enough to make the effect you desire, whether you just want you just want to
remove the noise in your image or blend some elements. Sometimes, people use built-in or
plugged in noise reduction effects available in the software their are using such selective
blurs etc. But these programs most often destroy the edges and flow of pixels in the artwork,
that is why smudging is done instead. Herein, your control the flow of pixels and amount of
smudging that occurs. If you have smudged enough to make the photo noiseless yet lacking
in depth and detail, it is a good idea to paint over the image by running fade out brush
20
strokes through the visible highlights (using a lightening color) or the visible shadows (using a
darkening color).

Tip 10: Learn from Others

The world wide web is another world where we can find a multitude of good examples and
bad examples. Yes, learn from both the good and bad. Look intently at the works you see
and compare what you like with what you don’t like. Distinguish what makes one work
different than the other. Try to imagine what tools were used on every part of each image
and try applying what suites you. Lastly, embrace objective criticism!

This image is originally uploaded and copyrighted in xyldrae.deviantart.com where credits to

images acquired are listed down. Exercise your eyes and try to spot the flaws in this
highlighting exercise.

CHAPTER 3 REVIEW
Chapter Summary ■ To get a handle on any multimedia
project, start with pencil, eraser, and
For your review, here’s a summary of the paper. Outline your project
important concepts discussed in this and your graphic ideas first: make a
chapter. flowchart; storyboard the project using
stick figures; use three-by-five index cards
Work out your graphical approach by and shuffle them until you get it right.
planning your approach, organizing your ■ Most authoring systems provide simple
tools, and configuring tools for creating the graphic objects
your computer workspace directly on your screen. Most can also
import objects from other applications.
■ What you see on a multimedia ■ Multimedia designers employ a variety
computer screen is the viewer’s primary of applications and tools to accomplish
connection to all of your many specialized tasks.
project’s content.
■ Work out your graphic approach before Differentiate among bitmap, vector, and
you begin, either in your head or during 3-D images and describe the capabilities
creative sessions with your client or and limitations of all three
colleagues. 21
 ■ When you lathe a shape, a profile of
■ Bitmaps are an image type most
the shape is rotated around a defined
appropriate for photo-realistic images and
axis (you can set the
complex drawings
direction) to create the 3-D object.
requiring fine detail.
■ Limitations of bitmapped images include
large files sizes and the inability to scale ■ Rendering is when the computer finally
or resize the uses intricate algorithms to apply the
image easily while maintaining quality. effects you have specified on the objects
■ A bitmap is a simple information matrix
you have created.
describing the individual dots of an
image, called pixels. Describe the use of colors and palettes in
Multimedia
■The image’s bit-depth determines the
number of colors that can be displayed
by an individual pixel. ■ Color is the frequency of a light wave
within the narrow band of the
■ You can grab a bitmap image from a
electromagnetic spectrum to
screen, scan it with a scanner, download
which the human eye responds.
it from a web site, or capture it from a
video capture device. ■ Different cultures associate certain
colors with different meanings.
■ You can then manipulate and adjust
many of its properties, and cut and paste ■ For 8-bit GIF images, the computer
among many bitmaps using specialized uses a palette of 256 colors to determine
which colors to display.
image-editing or “darkroom” programs.
■ Dithering is a process whereby the
■ Vector images are most appropriate for
color value of each pixel is changed to
lines, boxes, circles, polygons, and other
the closest matching color value in the
graphic shapes
target palette, using a mathematical
that can be mathematically expressed in
algorithm.
angles, coordinates, and distances.
■ If you are using a specialized
■ A vector object can be filled with color
application to make bitmaps or drawings,
and patterns, and you can select it as a
make sure your multimedia
single object.
authoring package can import the image
■ Vector-drawn objects use a fraction of files you produce, and that your
the memory space required to describe application can export such
and store the a file.
same object in bitmap form.
■ Most drawing programs can export a Cite the various file types used in
vector drawing as a bitmap. multimedia
■ Converting bitmaps to vector-drawn
objects is difficult; however, autotracing ■ GIF and PNG images use palettes of
programs can colors.
compute the boundaries of shapes and ■ Windows uses device-independent
colors in bitmapped images and then bitmaps (DIBs) as its common image file
derive the polygon format, usually
object that describes those bounds. written as BMP files.
■ For 3-D, the depth (z dimension) of ■ TIFF, or Tagged Interchange File
cubes and spheres must be calculated Format, was designed to be a universal
and displayed so that bitmapped image
the perspective of the rendered object format and is also used extensively in
seems correct to the eye. desktop publishing packages.
■ Objects and elements in 3-D space ■ For handling drawn objects across
carry with them properties such as shape, many platforms, there are two common
color, texture, formats: DXF
shading, and location. and IGS. JPEG and GIF images are the
■ To model an object that you want to most common bitmap formats used on
place into your scene, you must start with the Web and
a shape. may be considered cross-platform, as all
■ When you extrude a plane surface, it browsers will display them.
extends its shape some distance, either
perpendicular to the
shape’s outline or along a defined path.

22
 10 tips in Photo Manipulation 10 tips in Photo Manipulation

1. You are doing it right now. 6. Before you merge layers, make
2. Get stock images to create your sure you’re done with the
idea or get your idea from stock shadows and highlights, and
images you see. sometimes, reflections.
3. Crop Cleanly and touch up the 7. Focus on the Focus!
edges
4. The background is one thing. The 8. Textures give a sense of feeling
Foreground is another thing. 9. Smudge, but not too much
5. Toning is vital! 10. Learn from Others

Key term Quiz

1. The working area of a computer display is sometimes called _______________.

2. The type of image used for photo-realistic images and for complex drawings requiring fine
detail is the_______________.
3. The type of image used for lines, boxes, circles, polygons, and other graphic shapes that
can be
mathematically expressed in angles, coordinates, and distances is the _______________.
4. The picture elements that make up a bitmap are called _______________.
5. _______________ allows you to smoothly blend two images so that one image seems to
melt into the next.
6. The process that computes the bounds of the shapes of colors within a bitmap image and
then derives the polygon object that describes that image is called _______________.
7. _______________ is when the computer uses intricate algorithms to apply the effects you
have specified on the objects you have created for a final 3-D image.
8. ________________ is the blocky, jagged look resulting from too little information in a
bitmapped image.
9. A collection of color values available for display is called a _______________.
10. _______________ is a process whereby the color value of each pixel is changed to the
closest matching color value in the target palette, using a mathematical algorithm.

Multiple-Choice Quiz

1. What is the best way to start creating your project’s interface?

a. Start with pencil, eraser, and paper.
b. Outline your project and graphic ideas.
c. Storyboard using stick figures.
d. Use three-by-five index cards and shuffle them.
e. All of the above

2. Which image file type is best for photographs?

a. vector b. encapsulated PostScript c. bitmap
d. Shockwave e. laser

3. A 24-bit image is capable of representing how

many different colors?
a. 2 b. 16 c. 256 d. 65,536 e. 16,772,216

4. Vector-drawn objects are used for all of the following except:

a. lines b. circles c. polygons d. photographs e. boxes

5. “Unlimited use” of stock photography may actually impose a limitation on:

a. the number of units you can distribute without paying more.
23
b. the number of changes you can make to the image.
c. converting the image to another file format.
d. the filters you may use to alter the image.
e. the price you can charge for your product.

6. Name the area of memory where data such as text and images is temporarily stored
when you
cut or copy within an application.
a. scrapbook b. notepad c. junkyard d. filedump e.
clipboard

7. Perhaps the single most significant advance in computer image processing during the late
1980s
was the development of:
a. digital cameras b. 3-D modeling programs c. image-editing programs
d. scanners e. electronic crayons

8. When an image created on a Macintosh is viewed on a PC:

a. it appears darker and richer because the values have changed
b. it appears lighter and less saturated because the values have changed
c. it appears darker and richer even though the values have not changed
d. it appears lighter and less saturated even though the values have not changed
e. it appears exactly the same

9. Graphic artists designing for print media use vector-drawn objects because:
a. they can contain more subtle variations in shading than bitmap graphics
b. printing inks respond better to them
c. they can be converted across platforms more easily
d. they can be scaled to print at any size
e. they can be viewed directly in Web browsers

10. The 3-D process of extending a plane surface some distance, either perpendicular to the
shape’s
outline or along a defined path, is called:
a. lathing b. rendering c. modeling d. extruding e. skinning

11. A GIF image may contain:

a. 8 bits of color information per pixel
b. 16 bits of color information per pixel
c. 24 bits of color information per pixel
d. 32 bits of color information per pixel
e. 48 bits of color information per pixel

12. Which of these is the correct HTML hexadecimal representation of magenta (red + blue)?
a. 00GGHH b. #FF00FF c. 255,0,255 d. %R100-%G0-%B100 e. <color = “magenta”>

13. Which of the following is not a color specification format?

a. RGB b. HSB c. GIF d. CMYK e. CIE

14. Which of the following is not a native Windows graphics file format?
a. BMP b. RIFF c. TIFF d. PCX e. PICT

15. TIFF stands for:

a. Transitional Image File Format
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b. Total Inclusion File Format
c. Tagged Interchange File Format
d. Temporary Instruction File Format
e. Table Index File Format

Essay Quiz

■ Discuss the difference between bitmap and vector graphics. Describe five different
graphic elements you might use in a project, for example, the background, buttons,
icons, or text. Would you use a vector tool or a bitmap tool for each element? Why?

Laboratory 3.1

■ Visit different web sites. Describe the use of colors for each in subjective terms. Is
each site vibrant? childish? muted? subtle? Why? What cultural or other factors
determined the color selection? Take a screenshot from each site, and write a
paragraph describing the colors and images used in each one.

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