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Virtual School. Information Technology. Graphics in context. |
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Links Teacher / parent notes |
Graphics in context. Word Processing | Desk Top Publishing | Spreadsheets | Databases Graphics software is used to manipulate images. It has taken over a large part of the traditional work of the graphic design studio and artists who once worked with fine brushes, pens, stick-on letters, glue and paint now use Photoshop and Illustrator, which are advanced "Paint" and "Draw" programs. The original picture is no longer traced by hand or printed onto paper from a photograph, but scanned into a computer or the original is digital from a digital camera and the image is then transformed digitally by the software until a hard copy is produced at the end. See Photo-retouching for how a photograph is transformed. Workinhg with a digital image means separate images can be combined more easily, actions performed on an image can be undone very quickly (meaning that you can experiment but always can return to an earlier version) and the output, the final product, can as easily be printed in a magazine, screened on a television or broadcast on the Internet. In the pre-computer system different products had to be produced for different media, which was more time consuming. As you worked through the stages of producing the image it was easy to lose quality as each copy was a poor copy of the one before. In digital copying a copy is identical to the original. Architects also prefer computer graphics as they have a collection of elements (standard doors, windows, symbols etc) which they can "paste" into each new drawing and they can change parts of the drawing without redrawing the whole thing. Advanced computer systems can even produce 3D "walk through" environments from original two-dimensional drawings. In this way people can see a building more realistically, as if they were walking through it themselves, looking at balanced perspectives and proportions with differing light and shade. Computer graphics are used for computer games and in film and television. they can even combine real film with computerised images, for example in the recent BBC TV series "Walking with Dinosaurs" where the backgrounds were real places in distant parts of the world, but the dinosaurs were drawn on computers, animated to make them seem to move realistically, then blended together. Images produced digitally can also be sent quickly via e-mail to distant offices where previously couriers and postal systems would have delivered work slowly. In this way designers can work together on a project while living great distances apart.
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