Page 227 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Unit 13: Multimedia Tools for WWW

Painting software, such as Photoshop, Fireworks, and Painter, is dedicated to producing crafted notes
bitmap images. Drawing software, such as CorelDraw, FreeHand, Illustrator, Designer, and Canvas,
is dedicated to producing vector-based line art easily printed to paper at high resolution.
Some software applications combine drawing and painting capabilities, but many authoring
systems can import only bitmapped images. Typically, bitmapped images provide the greatest
choice and power to the artist for rendering fine detail and effects, and today bitmaps are used in
multimedia more often than drawn objects. Some vector based packages such as Macromedia’s
Flash are aimed at reducing file download times on the Web, and may contain both bitmaps and
drawn art. The anti-aliased character shown in the bitmap of Color Plate 5 is an example of the
fine touches that improve the look of an image.
Look for these features in a drawing or painting packages:
• An intuitive graphical user interface with pull-down menus, status bars, palette control,
and dialog boxes for quick, logical selection.
• Scalable dimensions, so you can resize, stretch, and distort both large and small bitmaps.
• Paint tools to create geometric shapes, from squares to circles and from curves to complex
polygons.
• Ability to pour a colour, pattern, or gradient into any area.
• Ability to paint with patterns and clip art.
• Customizable pen and brush shapes and sizes.

• Eyedropper tool that samples colours.
• Auto trace tool that turns bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines.
• Support for scalable text fonts and drop shadows.
• Multiple undo capabilities, to let you try again.
• Painting features such as smoothing coarse-edged objects into the background with anti-
aliasing, airbrushing in variable sizes, shapes, densities, and patterns; washing colors in
gradients; blending; and masking.

• Support for third-party special effect plug-ins.
• Object and layering capabilities that allow you to treat separate elements independently.
• Zooming, for magnified pixel editing.
• All common colour depths: 1-, 4-, 8-, and 16-, 134-, or 313- bit colour, and grayscale.
• Good colour management and dithering capability among colour depths using various
colour models such as RGB, HSB, and CMYK.
• Good palette management when in 8-bit mode.
• Good file importing and exporting capability for image formats such as PIC, GIF, TGA,
TIF, WMF, JPG, PCX, EPS, PTN, and BMP.

13.6 sound editing tools

Sound editing tools for both digitized and MIDI sound let’s hear music as well as create it. By
drawing a representation of a sound in fine increments, whether a score or a waveform, it is
possible to cut, copy, paste and otherwise edit segments of it with great precision.

System sounds are shipped both Macintosh and Windows systems and they are available as soon
the Operating system is installed. For MIDI sound, a MIDI synthesizer is required to play and

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