Page 133 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Unit 7: Multimedia Software Tools

• Auto trace tool that turns bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines. notes
• 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 colours 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.

Graphic impact of your multimedia presentation is very important in influencing the students.
It is the graphics that would create the first impression of your multimedia project. These tools
are, therefore, very useful in giving you the desired capability in terms of drawing and painting.
Painting and drawing tools generally come with a graphical user interface with pull down menus
for quick selection. You can create almost all kinds of possible shapes and resize them. These tools
have the capability to colour with paint and clip arts. One can use brushes of different sizes and
shapes according to the need. One can use layers to give different treatment to each element. Most
of these tools come with built-in plug-ins for performing different tasks. Once you are done with
the drawing, it can be imported or exported in many image formats like .gif, .tif, .jpg, .bmp, etc.
We will give a brief description of good drawing software known as CorelDraw.
With CorelDraw, you can create illustrations from scratch. It has wide-ranging features to handle
text and to create drawing with precision. It can be used to improve clip art, pictures and photos. It
is an ideal tool for any design project like technical drawings, advertisements, logos, etc. It can be
used in creating full-colour illustrations for multifarious drawings and graphics for any designing
project. It has lot of clip arts and high-quality drawings, which can be inserted into your multimedia
project. One can also generate drawing for an animation sequence by using CorelDraw.
To avoid exporting unwanted objects, create an invisible border around your
arrangement of objects to add an artificial boundary, when you are exporting
an image.

Give some examples of image format converters.

History of text editors

f you still think that Microsoft Notepad or EMacs were the first Text Editors ever known to
the mankind then you are so incorrect. There had been Text Editors even before them, some
Iwere Free and others were either licensed under some License or were proprietary.
Contd...

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