KALASALINGAM UNIVERSITY

(KALASALINGAM ACADEMY OF RESEARCH & EDUCATION)

ACCREDITED BY NAAC WITH“A”GRADE
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KRISHNANKOIL – 626126

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
MULTIMEDIA AND ITS APPLICATIONS
STUDY METRIALS
UNIT – 3: MULTIMEDIA TEXT, GRAPHICS AND IMAGES

1. MULTIMEDIA TEXT:

Text is an important component used in many multimedia projects. They are characters
that are used to create words, sentences and paragraphs. Text is words and symbols in any
form, spoken or written, are the most common system of communication.

Text Elements
Text elements can be categories into:
– Alphabets characters: A – Z
– Number: 0 – 9
– Special characters: . , ; : ‘ “

– Symbols: @ # $ & *

Text Usages
–

– Heading / Title
– Bullet / list
– Paragraph
– Scrolling text
– Navigation
– Text as graphics

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Using Text in Multimedia

The text elements used in multimedia are:

Menus for navigation

Interactive buttons

Fields for reading

HTML documents

Symbols and icon

Text Properties:

Text has several properties to design and develop a multimedia project.

a) Font
b) Typeface
c) Font style
d) Font Type
a) Font

 A design for a set of characters.

 A collection of characters belonging to a particular typeface family.

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  There is some basic consistency of look that makes the individual characters,
regardless of size and style variations, part of the same family.
 Usually vary by type sizes and styles.
 Font sizes are measure in points

Font Size
•The size of a font, typically represented in points (pt).
•The font size is the distance from the top of the capital letters to the bottom of the
"descenders" in letters such as "g" and "y."

b) Typeface
A ‘typeface’ is a family of graphic characters that usually includes many type sizes and
styles. A typeface contains a series of fonts. For instance, Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow
and Arial Unicode MS are actually 4 fonts under the same family.
 Arial
 Arial Black
 Arial Narrow
 Arial Unicode MS
Typeface has several properties such as:
 Ascender – is a upstroke on a character and can be found in the letters.

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  Descender – is a down stroke below the baseline of a character.
 Leading – is spacing above and below a font, that is a line spacing.
 Tracking – is spacing between end of the characters.
 Kerning – is spacing between pair of the characters.

c) Font Style
The technology of font styles is bringing viewer’s attention to content.
 Upper and lower cased letter
 Bold, Italic, Underline, Superscript and Subscript
 Embossed or Shadow
 Colors
 Strikethrough

d) Font Type
Fonts can be characterized as
– Serif
– Sans serif
– Decorative

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 Serif – have a little "flag" or decoration at the end of the letter stroke.
Sans Serif – characters don't have these strokes.

Decorative – Used to decorate, embellish, and beautify a text. It will quickly capture
attention of the readers and make a text easier to understand.

2) MULTIMEDIA GRAPHICS:
Graphics are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen,
paper, or stone to inform, illustrate, or entertain. Images that are generated by a computer are
called computer graphics. Graphics often combine text, illustration, and color.
Examples: Photographs, drawings, Line art, graphs, diagrams, numbers, symbols,
geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, or other images.

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Uses of Graphics
Graphics are visual elements often used to point readers and viewers to particular
information. Graphics are among the primary ways of advertising the sale of goods or
services. Graphics frequently used in following domains:
Business
Graphics are commonly used in business and economics to create financial charts and
tables. The term Business Graphics came into use in the late 1970s, when personal computers
became capable of drawing graphs and charts instead of using a tabular format.
Advertising
Advertising is one of the most profitable uses of graphics; artists often do advertising
work or take advertising potential into account when creating art, to increase the chances of
selling the artwork.
Political
The use of graphics for overtly political purposes—cartoons, graffiti, poster art, flag
design, etc.
Education
Graphics are heavily used in textbooks, especially those concerning subjects such as
geography, science, and mathematics, human anatomy. Diagrams are also used to label
photographs and pictures.
Film and animation
Computer graphics are often used in the majority of new feature films, especially those
with a large budget. Films that heavily use computer graphics include The Lord of the Rings
film trilogy, the Harry Potter films, Spider-Man and War of the Worlds.

3) COLORING

Color is a vital component of multimedia. Coloring used in a display systems like

monitors and LCD TV are used to display millions of colors in Multimedia projects.
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Computerized Color Models:

There are several color models used in computer graphics such as RGB model (Red,
Green, Blue) for computer display and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) for printing.

RGB Model:

 Describes colors that emanate from glowing bodies such as lights, TV, and computer
monitors
 In additive color models, mixing two colors results in a brighter color

o Red + green -> yellow

o Green + blue -> cyan

o Red + blue -> magenta

CYMK Model:

 The CMYK model is used for print work and it describes

colors based on their percentage of Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and Black.
 These four colors are needed to reproduce full color
artwork in magazines, books and brochures.

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Color Depth:

Color depth is also known as bit depth. Two main parameters control the quality of
display.

a. Color palettes
b. Resolution
a) Color Palettes

Palettes are mathematical tables that define the color of a pixel displayed on the screen.
The most common palettes are 1, 4, 8, 16, and 24 bits deep:

b)
Resolution
Total number of logical pixels, in terms of rows and columns supported by the display
systems.

Dithering

Dithering is a process whereby the color value of each pixel is changed to the closest
matching color value in the target palette, using a mathematical algorithm.

4) DIGITAL IMAGE FUNDAMENTALS

An image represented in the form of rows and columns. An element occupies the rows
and columns in the image called as pixel. Each pixel have a unique numeric value to represent
the color.

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 An Image can capture many ways. One of traditional way to capture the still images is
taken with the help of camera.

Types of Images:

Still images produced by the computer categorized into two types:

 Bitmap images
 Vector images.

Bitmap Image

Bitmap (or raster) images are stored as a series of tiny dots called pixels. Each pixel is
actually a very small square that is assigned a color, and then arranged in a pattern to form the
image. Bitmaps are used for photo-realistic images and for complex drawings requiring fine
detail. Bitmaps are colors images if sometimes and occupies more space. The three most
popular image formats used on the Web (PNG, JPEG, and GIF) are bitmap formats.

Types of bitmap images

Bitmap images can contain any number of colors but there are four main categories:

Grayscale images: It contains various shades of gray as

well as pure black and white. Typically 256 shades of gray
(8-bit) are used even though the human visual system needs
only 100 tints to perceive an image as life-like.

Color images: The color information can be described

using a number of color spaces: RGB, CMYK or Lab for
instance.

Vector image

Vector-drawn objects are used for lines, boxes, circles,

polygons, and other graphic shapes that can be mathematically

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expressed in angles, coordinates, and distances. A drawn object can be filled with color and
patterns, and you can select it as a single object. The appearance of both types of images
depends on the display resolution and capabilities of your computer’s graphics hardware and
monitor. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format comes in a distant fourth due to a
legacy of poor support for vector graphics in early browsers.

Vector images tend to be smaller than bitmap images. That’s because a bitmap image
has to store color information for each individual pixel that forms the image. A vector image
just has to store the mathematical formulas that make up the image, which take up less space.

5) DEVELOPMENT AND EDITING GRAPHICS:

The following important editing concepts are:

 Anti-aliasing
 Layering
 Selection
 Morphing
 Image filters
Anti-aliasing

This technique smooth the jaggies appears in the font or object contours. Professional
photo editing software used anti-aliasing concepts for smoothing the edges.

Layering

Layering is an important concept of the graphics. According to this concept each image
is made up of one or more layers. Ex. Photoshop.

Selections

A selection represents a particular portion in the whole image in the screen.

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Morphing

Morphing is another effect that can be used to manipulate still images or to create
interesting and often bizarre animated transformations. Morphing allows you to smoothly
blend two images so that one image seems to melt into the next, often producing some
amusing results.

Image Filters

Several kinds of the algorithms are used to smooth the image. This operation reduces
the noise in the image. Adobe photoshop uses the image filters for smoothening operations.

6) IMAGE FILE FORMATS

In the computer systems, image has represented as different file format with different
file name extensions. File formats are different for bitmap image and vector image.

Bitmap File format

Bitmap data can be saved in a wide variety of file formats. Among these are:

BMP (Bitmap): The BMP file format is capable of storing two-dimensional digital images
both monochrome and color, in various color depths, and optionally with data compression,
alpha channels, and color profiles. This file type images are stored with .bmp extension.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): It is mainly used for internet graphics. It is a file
extension for an often animated raster graphics file. This file format is commonly used for
drawings cartoons and animation. It is the second most common image format used on the
World Wide Web after JPEG. GIF uses the LZW compression algorithm.

JPEG / JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): This format takes less storage space
when compared with other image formats. Hence this is supported by digital cameras and
mobile phones. JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images,
particularly for those images produced by digital photography.

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PICT: It is a file format that can contain both bitmap and vector data but that is mainly used
on Macintosh computers.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format): It is a lossless compression file format supported by all
operating systems. A TIFF file can be identified as a file with a ".tiff" or ".tif" file name
suffix. TIFF files are commonly used in desktop publishing, faxing, 3-D applications, and
medical imaging applications.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics): PNG is a raster graphics file format that supports
lossless data compression. It maintains the quality of image but the size of image is larger
than other formats.

Vector File format

File formats that are used for vector data.

EPS (Encapsulated Postscript Vector graphics): It is a flexible file format that can contain
both bitmap and vector data. It is the most popular file format to exchange vector drawings
even though PDF is quickly gaining ground.

PDF (Portable Document Format): a versatile file format that can contain just about any
type of data including complete pages. PDF files have lossless compression, which means that
if you reduce the size of a PDF file, you do not lose any information.

PSD (Photoshop Document): A .PSD file is a layered image file used in Adobe PhotoShop.
PSD is a proprietary file that allows the user to work with the images’ individual layers even
after the file has been saved. Photoshop allows the user to flatten the layers and convert the
flat image into a .JPG, .GIF, .TIFF or other non-proprietary file format so it can be shared.

AI (Adobe Illustrator Artwork): AI is a proprietary file format developed by Adobe

Systems for representing single-page vector-based drawings in either the EPS or PDF
formats. AI files are vector based graphics contained in a single page.

7) SCANNING AND DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Scanning:

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 The process of converting objects into a digital format that can be recognized by a
computer is known as scanning.

Scanner

Scanner is a device that converts physical objects into the image and transfer the data
to the computer. It can created images like:

Hand drawn pictures

Text images
Photographic prints
Posters
Magazine pages
It uses images in the digital format which can be feed into the documents.

Types of Scanner:

Flat bed scanner

Sheet fed scanner
Handheld scanner
Scanning Process:
To scan a page using paint program using following steps:
Step 1: Open the top cover of the scanner. Placing the required picture or object placed on the
scanner bed.

Step 2: Open a paint program

Step 3: Click paint button

Step 4: Select from scanner or camera option

Step 5: Click the advance setting options.

Step 6: Click ok button when you are finish adjusting the settings.

Step 7: Click the scan button.

Step 8: When the transfer completes, Save image at the desired location.

Digital Photography
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 Digital photography is the process of taking photographs using specialized digital
cameras and storing the images directly as digital data.

Digital photography is currently frequently used in the printing and news industries.
Reporters can take a digital photograph of an incident and transmit the data immediately via
email.

Basic Principles of Digital Photography

Digital photography is a form of photography that uses cameras containing arrays of

electronic photo detectors to capture images focused by a lens.

The captured images are digitized and stored as a computer file ready for further digital
processing, viewing, digital publishing or printing.

The stream of electronic analog signal is generated by the transistors. Analog to digital
convertor (ADC) converts the analog signal into digital data in the form of zeros and ones.

These data can be processed by the Digital signal processor (DSP) and produce the
images that are stored in the magnetic disk (Hard disk in the computer).

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