After text, the most familiar medium, to most people is graphics. For simple illustrations, the Paint program bundled with Windows 95 is a good basic tool. Another level up, the CorelDraw package adds many helpful functions and a slew of clip art and fonts. The ultimate tool is Adobe Photoshop, which not only offers professional draw and paint tools, but also acquires scanned photos and lets you modify them in nearly infinite and unimaginable ways. (See Figure 7.) It also imports nearly every one of the multitudinous graphics file formats, and can save anything it imports as the universally accepted BMP format. Vector-based art, such as images created with paths in Adobe Illustrator, cannot be imported into most authoring programs without first being converted into a bitmap. Check the program you intend to compile all your components into to see what formats it imports. Again, size is a concern, but not as great as with sound or video, which stream through the processor. Like digital audio, computer images look better when theyΓÇÖre bigger. A 24-bit graphics file can contain millions of colors, looks great, and results in a huge file. For data flow reasons, most images in multimedia are jammed into 8-bit words, and usually require tweaking to be satisfactory. Since a graphic usually only loads once, the concern is primarily with the initial delay. With a massive color palette and unruly resolution and dimensions, this can add up. While many authoring programs allow you to reduce oversize artwork to fit a frame, avoid this option whenever possible. It just congests matters unnecessarily. Stick to screen resolutions and reasonable dimensions (usually no more than 640x480). Some graphics formats, such as GIF and JPEG include compression schemes that can speed load times if the algorithm is more efficient than the bulk it replaces. Experiment with your files before you decide. Use Photoshop to create or edit any kind of image andΓÇôespecially with its wide range of plug-insΓÇôdistort, filter, and otherwise process an image in a fantastic number of ways. The graphics and illustrations you develop in Photoshop, or any of these programs, will be imported into either your video editor or multimedia authoring program.
A series of images, each different in some small way from the next, can be displayed sequentially by the video or authoring program to create a simple animated character, element, logo, or chart.
