Bitmap To Vector Conversion

By Author: Briley D.
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Ever taken a very great picture using your phone? The picture looks all clear and perfect through your cellphone screen. However, the same picture does not appear so perfect once displayed on a pc screen or any device with a larger and better display than that of your cellphone's screen.

Ever taken a very great picture using your phone? The picture looks all clear and perfect through your cellphone screen. However, the same picture does not appear so perfect once displayed on a pc screen or any device with a larger and better display than that of your cellphone's screen. This is because you cellphone's camera takes photos in bitmap format. This is a type of picture that is constructed using millions of single discrete dots referred to as pixels. Unless you convert the image from bitmap to vector image; the image becomes distorted as you continue to increase its size either through a large display devices such as a bigger pc screen, a projector or even just the use of the zoom function.

Bitmap images are available in different formats, the most common being JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, all these offer different file ...
... sizes for pictures of the same quality. For these file formats, increasing quality means significant increase in file size. Bitmap to vector mapping refers to the process of converting these file formats from bitmap images to vector images.

A bitmap image is characterized by use of pixels to construct the image, initial, dot matrix images were in grey scale, meaning the only colours available were black and white with the different shades of grey representing the different colours in the image. Advanced coloured bitmap images apply intelligent mixing of different shades of red yellow and blue colours to create millions of different coloured pixels that come together to build an image.

Vector images on the other hand are more advanced images built using shapes features such as lines, dots and shapes based on mathematical expressions. Vector images are much clearer and are able remain intact during scaling to different sizes. Conversion of bitmap to vector involves the use of special software to trace the bitmaps to vector quantities, changing from bitmap to vector is much more complicated than from vector to bitmap. This is because bitmap to vector conversion involves conversion of the bitmaps into accented strokes or lines through points referred to as control points.

Because bitmap to vector conversions helps improve the quality of images especially where scaling is required, the resulting images can then be scaled to different sizes for use on larger forms of displays such as banners bill boards. Bitmap to vector conversions also leads to increased colour quality and makes the image much easier to manipulate for different purposes. Some of the known vector images include EPS, SVG, PDF, AI.

There are a number of different ways through which a bitmap image can be converted to vector; one of them most basic ways of bitmap to vector conversion is through hand tracing using certain graphics software. One can also you automated bitmap to vector conversion tools on certain applications that are able to do the job for after inputting the recommended settings. However, in order to avoid any degradation of the image quality perfect results can be achieved by having this type of conversions done by experts.
Resource: http://www.xhtmlchop.com/bitmap-to-vector.html