File Formats

Printing Poster Graphics

Are you a budding film maker? Do you want a poster for your film? In this article I'm going to be teaching you about the different files & formats that you will need to make a poster.

Formats

First lets talk about the 2 different formats you will need and which applications these formats are on. Lets start with Vector Graphics, Vector Graphics are images that use lines, curves, shapes and polygons to create their images. These mean that the image can be expanded and shrunk without losing the image quality.

Vector Graphic Applications

There are a variety of different Vector-based Applications. I will not be talking about all of them but just to name a few, first and maybe the most popular Adobe Illustrator with it's many different tools, Illustrator can be used to make very high detailed graphics:



Formats (cont.)

 If you don't want to spend a lot of money on getting Adobe products there are others such as Inkscape or Xara photo & Graphic Designer & Macromedia Free Hand just to name a few. All of these programs use Vector graphics so can all be used the same way.

The other format is Raster Graphics this means that digital camera photos or photos from the internet which are made of pixels, these are also referred to as bitmaps. Also the larger the image the memory it will take when being saved.

Raster Graphic Applications

The same as Vector Applications there are a variety of Raster-based applications. The first is another adobe program, Photoshop there is a lot of different tools on Photoshop giving you endless options for your images.

Other options for Raster programs if you don't want Adobe software are; MS Paint, GIMP or Painter. They all do the same as Photoshop but with a lot less tools to work with.

File Extensions

When it comes to programs such as Photoshop there are a lot of different ways to save files, although you need them all here are some examples of the extensions you will need for creating DVD images:

• .jpg (JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group) this is used for Digital images from Cameras or the internet.
• .tiff (Tagged Image File Format) this is used for images that will be desktop published.
• .png (Portable Network Graphics) this is used for palette-based images.
• .gif (Graphics Interchange Format) this is used for short animations.
• .bmp (Bitmap) This is used to save bitmap digital images.
• .RAW (RAW) This is a camera image that has minimal processed data.
• .psd (Photoshop Document) This is a saved Photoshop document that keeps all layers separated so it can be opened and edited another time.
• ai (Adobe Illustrator) This is used to save Illustrator files that can be edited when re-opened and vector files that can be exported from Illustrator to Photoshop.

Metafiles

Finally metafiles, these are a piece of graphical information that is stored in a format that can be exchanged between different software.