Vector Images

Vector images are the images that contain paths that contain text, lines and shapes. It is composed with lines and curves to make the image smoother and the colours are arranged by a mathematical equation called vector. Unlike raster images vector images are resolution independent meaning the images will not lose their quality no matter how big they are made. This would be useful for posters, magazine covers, website images, web pages, web advertisements, logos and billboards.

 

The only disadvantage of vector is that it’s not photorealistic. It lacks depth and appearance in the value and colours of a continuous tone image.

 

PSD

 

PSD is Photoshop Document shortened. It is created when you save a document on Photoshop. It can be converted to a raster image or a vector image. It can have the maximum height and width of 30,000 pixels and the limit size of 2 Gigabytes. It is used for Webpages and logos. But also Photoshop can also work on raster images.

 

FLA

 

FLA files contain source material from adobe flash. This format can be compiled into Shock Wave Flash (SWF). Flash is also what’s used to make GIF files and it is also known to make my own animations for web cartoons and for making flash video games.

 

AI

 

Ai files are used in Adobe Illustrator. It is a vector based format. It can be used to make images and game sprites. I quickly made this character to show as an example that even if you resize the image like a building it would not lose its quality. In my personal experience I use Illustrator to create the background and sprites for a video game I was making called “Halo Boy”.

 

PDF

 

In 1991 adobe systems created the Portable Document Format or PDF for short. It was created to be a document format that can work on software, hardware and operating systems. The contents of this format would have texts, fonts, graphics and other information required. This is a vector because when I enlarge the document it does not lose its quality and become blurry so I can see the words clearly (it’s easier to read with vector formats).