Graphics

Graphics software comes in many varieties:

Painting programs
Drawing programs
Design graphics
Engineering
Architectural
Commercial art
Image editing and photo retouching
Presentation graphics
Flow charts
Mapping programs
Animation

Common uses of graphics software range from drawing an illustration for a company newsletter to planning a building project or a new car design. Images created in a graphics program can be used in word processing or desktop publishing projects, placed on a web page, sent in an email message, used as slides in presentations, incorporated in a magazine ad, printed to a printer or plotter as in building plans or blueprints, or incorporated into an animation or desktop video program to produce a movie, animation or television advertisement.

Most graphics programs rely heavily on the use of the mouse as a tool for drawing or manipulating images on the screen. Some designers may prefer to use a "drawing tablet" - a pad-like device that can be drawn onto using a pen-like stylus.

Another hardware device related to graphics work is the scanner. There are three types of scanners - hand, page and flatbed. They all work similar to a copy machine. An image (page, photo, document, etc.) is placed into the scanner and instead of copying the image to paper like the copier does, the image appears on the computer video screen where it can be cropped, edited and saved to a disk, printed or imported into a document.

Scanners can be used with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert text from a page (scanned in as an image file, in other words, a "picture" of the page) into a word processing (text) file that can be edited using word processing or text editing software.

Digital cameras take pictures that are copied onto your hard drive or CD. You can use photo editing software to adjust, size or crop the pictures, organize them on your disk, print the photos, or transfer the photo to an email message or a web page.

Presentation software is used primarily to create on-screen slide show presentations, but can also be used to create handouts or transparencies. The software makes it easy to create a good looking slide containing text, graphics, and even sound and video! Slide show presentations are widely used in meetings, marketing, training, orientations, and as a visual aid to a speaker's presentation. Some examples of presentation software are Microsoft PowerPoint, Harvard Graphics, Lotus Freelance Graphics, Corel Presentations, and OpenOffice Impress.

Some examples of drawing, painting and photo editing software are Microsoft Picture It!, Microsoft Photo Editor, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw and OpenOffice Draw.

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Graphics

"What would you like to do next?"

Choose another lesson topic

Return to "The Starting Line"

Check out my favorite WWW links