Hello everyone. I just had a question, really just something I wanted clarified: What are vector images? And how does one go about making a vector image? Is it just a filtering process or something? I hear the term thrown around a lot, and I just wanted to see if someone can put it in plain terms for me. Thanks in advance.
Let’s back up a sec and talk about the two different types of images. Vector and Raster.
Raster: An example of raster is a picture from your camera. If you zoom way in, you will see that it is made from thousands of small blocks called pixels (this is where the whole mega-pixel camera thing comes from). While you can easily make a raster image smaller, it is hard to make it much larger w/o suffering from what’s called image degradation (image looks like junk when it gets enlarged). So this type of image is considered non-scaleable.
Vector: An example of a vector image is one I created here:
http://www.jonbrittphoto.com/gallery/3576360/1/203700617/Large
This image is made up of mathmatical equations and is 100% scaleable. These equations are all the straight and curved lines you see combined to make this image. This means I can shrink it down to the size of a dime or enlarge it to the size of a football field at it will look exactly the same.
Vector Art is used for illustration, logos, signage, anything that needs to be “scaled”. All logos such as the Adobe “A” are created in vector. They are then converted to raster to things like web browsers casn “see” them and show them to you on a screen.
The industry standard is Adobe Illustrator. You can download a free 30 day trial from Adobe.com.
Adobe Illustrator Vector artwork is the standard for anything that you might need to use in multiple sizes in the future. Logos, clothing designs, flyers, postcards.. are all good examples of this. A person may use their logo on their business cards and then later get a custom billboard made to put in front of their store for advertising and need their logo on this. If it was created in Vector, they could simply open up Illustrator resize the image and save it back out as a jpeg, or tiff, or png or whatever was needed and it would look just as good either way. A lot of clients aren’t aware of this, so it’s a good selling point if you know how to do vector art and you’re bidding on a job doing a logo. You put in a few sentences about the benefits of the vector art you can create for them and they’re sold on you right away.
Vectors are very common on websites throughout the internet. I use Illustrator to create all of my web-graphics. I do use photoshop when there is an image involved, because it is a more powerful tool in that aspect.
