Test 1 Review

What is communication technology?
1. Communication Technology gives students a better perspective on technology and its nature. It also shows students how to use and apply many of the programs out there. The students learn the impact of technology on themselves and on society. One of the main focuses in this course is the application of artistic perspective and thinking to the projects created. This course encourages the use of imagination due to the fact that technology has made it so easy to express it through a visual means. There are many different fields that this course introduces us to, leaving us to make the decision on which path we would like to venture down. One of the first areas we explore is Photoshop. This program makes it easy to create a work of art digitally with the use of many tools at the click of a button. Not only can it be used to create but it can also be used as a means of editing pictures that have already been created in the past as well as photographs. The next program we are introduced to is flash. In this program we are shown the art of 2-D animation. In this program you tell a story using many drawings that will depict time and motion once it is played. It is played like a flipbook, all of the images are separate but played at a quick speed and drawn properly will give it life. The next thing we learnt how to do was how to create a proper website. We where shown how to link everything together, create ads and basically customize the page to give it our own little touch. The last thing we learnt was video editing. This is my personal favorite area due to the fact that it lets you expand your imagination realistically and it also pieces everything together. First you start by storyboarding, which is the process of creating the story and visually giving an example of how you want it to look by drawing it out in quick sketches. The next step is getting the footage, you find all the necessities and then you film what you need until you have the perfect shot. Once you have your clips you bring them into an editing program and begin piecing everything together and editing them by giving them special effects, cutting them or changing the speed. Finally you make sure the sound, works with the footage and then you export it making it your very own scene or movie. Communication technology is definitely a great course to take if a future in any technical arts interests you.

Vector vs. Bitmap (raster) Graphics
1. All the shapes within vector images are represented as mathematical formulas
2. The image is composed of a pattern of dots
3. Vector graphics are more flexible than bitmapped graphics because they look the same even when you shrink or enlarge (scale) them to different sizes. In contrast, bitmapped graphics become jagged when you scale them. Vector images also look better on devices (monitors and printers) with higher resolution, whereas bitmapped images always appear the same regardless of a device's resolution. And finally, vector images often require less memory than bitmapped images.
4. First, bitmapped images are better than vectors at providing the photo realism of an original scene. That's why digital images that are either created from scanned analog photographs or captured by digital cameras are stored as bitmapped images. Secondly, bitmapped images are supported by web browsers, whereas vector images are not.
5. Programs that enable you to create and manipulate vector graphics are called draw programs, whereas programs that create or manipulate bitmapped images are called paint programs.

GIF vs JPEG
1. GIF's compression is called "lossless" literally meaning "doesn't lose quality" when compressed. JPG employs "lossy" compression which literally means the image "loses" quality during the compression process.
2. The GIF format only supports a palette with 256 colors while JPG's palette supports 16 million colors.

JPEG vs TIF
1. TiF’s are larger sized files.
2. Generally the same

TIF vs PNG
1. PNG uses a more efficient compression algorithm than GIF, is patent-free and supports true color images.
2. While support for PNG images in browsers has been low in the past, they can now be safely used in all modern browsers
3. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is the most widely supported graphics file format for printing. Although TIFF is not suitable for viewing in Web browsers, it has other strengths: it is a highly flexible format which is supported by numerous image processing applications. TIFF was designed to be independent of the hardware platform and the operating system on which it executes.
4. PNG or TIFF cannot really substitute RAW files for later manipulation.