Capturing a
digital image is essentially having an image on a technical platform such as a
screen. This can be captured in many different ways from scanning, photography
and also pressing print screen on your keyboard.
A scanner is
a piece of kit that allows you to take an image or photograph on some paper and
transport it onto another platform such as a PC. This is done by the scanner
taking a series of images of the image being placed on the glass with a light
underneath it to get a clear image. There are many different types of scanners
on the market, there is the standard box scanner in which you place an image
under a lid for it to take the copies. This is a low quality image and pixels
are often dropped. Mouse scanners are becoming more common, these are scanner cameras
built into the laser on the mouse which captures the image by rolling the mouse
over it.
A bridge
camera is similar to a regular film camera except they have the ability to
store photographs inside the memory of the camera, this gives you the choice to
transfer them onto the PC using a USB cable. They work similar to an eye in
which light bounces off an image and returns back to the lens to create a solid
photograph. The price can vary drastically between types of cameras, from £30
for a standard low pixel camera too up to £3,000+ for a higher quality
professional bridge styled camera. Bridge cameras are far better if the user is
working on a professional basis as they produce much better quality due to the
higher resolution available on them. You also have the opportunity to fit
special lenses onto the more expensive bridge camera which produce fantastic
images, however this also comes at a higher cost, often more than the camera
itself.
If you are
considering working on digital art then a graphics tablet is a complete
must-have purchase for anyone, they are the leading tool in digital art. There
are many variations in brands but Wacom is currently the lead producer and they
provide a large range from basic standard to high quality industry professional.
The three main products from Wacom are Bamboo, Intuos and Cintiq, starting with
Bamboo, it is a simple piece of kit that allows you to simply draw using the
pen into photoshop or another software of your choice. There aren’t too many
tricks in this one and it is pretty standard for any beginner. Recently the
Bamboo tablet has changed its name to Intuos Basic and the traditional Bamboo
is now used as a signature tool. The next tablet is Intous, these are a leap up
from Bamboo and allow you to work on a higher quality more professional basis.
They have options such as extra macro buttons that will just make life easier
when producing art. They are sold roughly for £200+. The final one in the range
I will talk about is the Cintiq, this tablet is the most professional piece of
kit you can purchase but at a huge £3000 price tag you can definitely expect
value for money. Similar to the other
tablets, the Cintiq essentially lets you draw digitally, however this tablet
comes with a huge onscreen 24” display making it so much more convenient to
draw on without always looking up to your monitor.
Digital
graphics optimisation is cleaning up anything messy about the digital image,
this could be the compression, the file type and also the resolution. It is
essentially simplifying an image as a whole.
The image dimensions are what make up an image
and essentially how many pixels are in an image and how large it is. This is
often spoken about in monitors, for example, you could have a 1080p monitor
with an image resolution of 1920p. Simply put, the more pixels, the higher
quality the image.
Compressing an
image allows you to make the file size smaller, this is great for images that
will be placed upon the internet. This is dealt with in Lossy or Lossless compression.
The names are pretty self-explanatory but a Lossy Compression will lower the
pixels of an image but will not take into consideration the quality and it is
often reduced by a lot. Lossless Compression however does keep the optimum
level of quality while also lowering the pixel count.
When
considering optimising your images it’s very important to ensure the image has
a correct name and also ensuring that you name the image with its file
extension, this makes the process far less complicated and you can see immediately
what you are dealing with.
Another consideration
when working with digital images is the file size, this can be incredibly small
or incredibly large, it is important to consider all these aspects because if
someone if viewing your webpage and they are attempting to download an
essential part of your site and the size is so huge that it takes them 30
minutes to see anything then I’m pretty sure they won’t be returning to your
site any time soon. It is important to optimise an image where possible, not
only for you but for others using the image.
Asset
Managing Software in a shell is a an online cloud storage service that you will
be able to store any files on, this is great if you are working on a large
project with many people or if there is just an emergency with your own
computer and you have a backup of all your files. This software is often sold
at a price however there was a free version created by the creator of Linux,
however if you are a registered company then you have to pay a license fee.
