Vectors And Raster Based Applications Research

 www.macprovideo.com/hub/photoshop/photoshop-vs-illustrator - This link tells me the applications of vectors such as illustrator and raster applications on photoshop.

Raster and Photoshop

First off, a raster graphic (also sometimes called a bitmap graphic, but not to be confused with the .bmp file format) is an image that's comprised of tiny blocks of colour called pixels. Zoom in close enough on a raster image, and it begins to pixelate, like a mosaic. Raster graphics are what we call "resolution dependent" images. Essentially what that means is that quality is always a concern. Without getting into a lengthy conversation about resolution and re-sampling, let's just keep it simple for now and say that resizing your raster graphics is where problems, sometimes major problems, arise.

Examples of raster-based images include photographs, scans, digital paintings, website components like buttons and header graphics, and any other image that's made up of a lot (like, millions) of colours. Raster-based file formats include JPEG, GIF, PSD, PNG, and a few others.
So if there's a bunch of up front know-how, why even bother with raster graphics? Cuz they're cool! And this is where Photoshop comes in. Photoshop is our raster image editor. This is where we'll be doing all our colour correction on our photographs, touching things up, or creating special effects (like putting two heads on your mother-in-law...I recall there's a menu command for that one). Conceptual artists, digital painters, and comic book artists also turn to Photoshop for a lot of their work, too. As a web designer, I constantly use Photoshop to help mock up layouts, create web interfaces, and develop a lot of graphical components for sites I'm working on. As you can see, Photoshop is very flexible.

Vector and Illustrator

we have the world of vector graphics. Unlike raster graphics, vector images are "resolution independent," meaning you and I don't have to worry about quality, pixels, resolution, or re-sampling. Rather than being based on pixels, vector graphics are based on mathematical lines and curves. Of course, this is where Illustrator comes into play. And what I love so much about Illustrator is I can take something I've created, like a cartoon, and I can scale it larger or smaller, and not give a second thought to quality. A vector graphic is always top quality. Usually, but not always, vector graphics are images that are comprised of solid blocks of colour, like a cartoon, a company logo, or a block of text. So who's making use of Illustrator? Graphic designers, visual artists, apparel companies, and even technical illustrators. Vector-based file formats include AI, SVG, and Flash's FLA and SWF.


 http://msauer.mvps.org/vector%20bitmap.htm

Vector vs. Bitmap 

Programs like MS Paint and Photo Shop are both bitmap applications, treating the images you work with as a fixed-size resource made up of a fixed number of dots, or pixels. Once a line or curve or piece of text has been 'committed' to the canvas you cannot go back and change it without undoing and starting over again.

Also, since the information in a picture is represented by dots, you cannot enlarge the image without exaggerating the effect of these dots and making the picture look jagged. One advantage of using this scheme is that scanned photographs are always represented as bitmaps (the detail in the average photograph is way too complex to be represented as vectors), so if you want to work with these items you'll need a bitmap based program. Another advantage is the mathematical functions that can be performed on a bitmap, such as averaging the pixels to create a blur, or edge detection routines that emboss.

Vector based applications such as Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator treat images as collections of vectors and shapes. A line would have a starting point, direction and length, a rectangle would have a starting point, width and height, circles would have a center and radius, and so on. After drawing a rectangle you can go back and change its width and height, bring it to the foreground or send it to the background, even after other shapes had been drawn on top of it later. When saved to file, vector images also take up less disk space, since, for example in the case of a rectangle, the program is only storing four numbers no matter what its size: the x and y starting point, plus the width and height. In comparison, a bitmap application would have to store colour information for the 10,000 pixels that make up a 100x100 pixel rectangle.

Another advantage of Vector based applications is that you can re-size the final image to be as large or as small as you like and never obscure the detail with jagged edges.