Vector and Raster Graphics

For every design beginner who has just started learning about graphic design, knowing about some common small terms is indeed essential. Vector and raster are such types of terms that one should learn in the beginning. Thus, here’s a quick blog from our graphic design institute on the differences of vector and raster images. Let’s get to know about the uses and main differences of both types in detail.

Let’s start with the basic introduction of each point one by one.

What are raster graphics?

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Raster images are made of millions of coloured picture points; we may know them as pixels. They are common in general file formats such as JPG, GIF, and PNG which are widely used on the web or in the electronic media.

What are vector graphics?

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Vector images are made of anchor points which are defined by coordinates and mathematical formulas. Through paths these anchor points can then be connected, rounded and coloured. They are commonly used in print design, CAD, Engineering and 3D graphics.

Quality

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• Raster images have a limited amount of pixels; they become blurry when scaled more than the defined size.
• Vector images are mathematically recalculated and scaling won’t affect their quality.

Remember, at 100% both raster and vector graphics look good.

File Size

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• An average raster image is 2.7 megabytes and consists of almost 200,000 pixels. When scaling the image up in size the file of the raster image also increases in size.
• On an average, vector images are of 152 kilobytes and consist of two elements. When scaling these images up in size the file of the victor image stays the same (no change will come in file size).

Uses

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• Raster images are good when it comes to reality and detailing. These images cover real photos and can be used for almost every kind of designing or editing. These graphics are mostly used in photo editing, posters, banners, presentations, web design, etc. This type of images mainly works well in digital publication but not recommended for print media.
• Vector images are used for less detailed images such as logos, texts and illustrations which can be used for creating large size designs like posters, vehicle wraps, hoarding, banners, signage, and other large sized items.

Important Graphic Design Software

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To create vector types of graphics, you should go for Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. These applications are used for print-media designing and publication and come up with useful tools like Pen tool which enables the creation of paths.

For working on raster images, you can learn to use Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Corel Painter, Sketch App etc. These applications have capabilities of retouching and manipulating the photos. Digital paintings are also a type of raster image and can be created using software like Adobe Photoshop, Sketch App, and Corel Painter.

So, these were some important points about the two important types of graphics which are Raster and Vector that every graphic designer should know.

For quality training on all important concepts of graphic design, you are recommended to join our professional graphic design course that is a diploma of 12 months. It covers the grammar of design, fine arts and all kinds of software mentioned above. To know more about this course, you are always free to contact us.

Author Introduction

Hello, my name is Joydeep Biswas, coming from Kolkata. After completing my graduation and music classes for drumming, I joined a video editing cum graphic design course at ADMEC Multimedia Institute in New Delhi to polish my designing and photo editing skills. I always wanted to learn new and creative things and the most I like is editing because I want to set my career as an editor and always wanted to see myself as a graphic and post production artist in future. Thus, I decided to go for the Post Production Premium course from ADMEC.

This blog is on one of the concepts which I understood in my video editing and graphic design classes. So, I decided to make a piece of content on the same.

I hope this was useful for you readers.