Understanding pixels and bitmaps we may not be able to see them, but graphics are made up of thousands of tiny little dots. And these individual dots are called pixels. The higher the number of pixels, the better quality the graphical picture. The amount of pixels contained within a picture or graphic is called the resolution. Having a greater number of pixels is good. However, it does come with a cost to that can cause higher file sizes, and therefore more space required to store it.

In a bitmap image, the color of every single pixel is described. And depending upon how many colors there are can lead to some very large file sizes. We will discuss color depth more in the next lecture. As bitmaps can produce large file sizes, other formats that use compression techniques are used for images. These include joint photographic experts group or JPEG and Portable Network graphics. Which is abbreviated to PNG.

Vector images are different bitmaps as they describe shapes, such as rectangles and lines that make up an image. items that will be described about the shape include coordinates, line width, and fill color. Due to the way vectors are described, they can be made bigger or smaller without losing any of the clarity. They also take up less storage space, however, are not suitable for photos where the amount of shapes that would have to be described would make the process inefficient.