Course: B.Sc.

Applied Physical Science (Computer Science)

Year & Sem.: IIIrd Year, Sem - VIth
Subject: Computer Science
Paper No.: 24
Paper Title: Multimedia Systems and Applications
Lecture No.: 4
Lecture Title: Images in Multimedia Applications (Part - I)

Script
Hi viewers,so far in this series of lectures on multimedia, we have discussed whatmultimedia
basically is and one of the component of multimedia i.e. text. So the next topic for discussion in this
series is Images. And In this lecture we will be talking about the: Graphical approach, organizing the
tools, configuring computer workspace anddifferentiate among bitmap, vector, and 3‐D images.
Multimedia on a computer screen is a composite of elements like text, symbols, photograph,
distinctive buttons to click, and windowsof motion video. The computer screen is where the action
is, and it contains much morethan your message; it is also the viewer’s primary connection to all of
yourproject’s content.
This discussion will help you understand the visual elements that makeup a multimedia
presentation. Graphic elements can usually be scaledto different sizes, colorized or made
transparent, placedin front of or behind other objects, or be made visible or invisible oncommand.
How you blend these elements, how you choose your colorsand fonts, are the hallmarks of your skill,
talent, and creativity merged into the all‐important visual connection to yourviewers.
Before You Start to Create,Plan Your Approach
At the beginning of a project, the screen is a blank canvas, ready for you, to express your craft. The
screen will change again and again during the course of your project as you experiment and reshape
elements, draw new objects and test various colors and effects—creating the vehicle for your
message. Whether you use templates provided by your authoring system, clip art or objects crafted
by others,there will, always be a starting point where your page is “clean.” But even before reaching
this starting point, be sure you have given your project a good deal of thought and planning. Work
out your graphic approach, either in your head or during creative sessions with your client or
colleagues. To get a handle on any multimedia project, you start with pencil, eraser, and paper.
Outline your project and your graphic ideas first, make a flowchart or storyboard the project. You
may not “nail it” with the first design you submit to a client. Get a few examples from them or have
them look at templates from a site such astemplatemonster.com. When you have a clear idea what
they want, submit a few variations—different visual designs, and layouts. Whole of this exercise
does help in good designing and works for the satisfaction of the client.
Organize Your Tool
Most authoring systems provide the tools with which you can create the graphic objects of
multimedia directly on your screen. If one of these tools is not included, the authoring system
usually offers a mechanism for importing the object you need from another application. When you
are working with animated objects or motion video, most authoring systems include a feature for
activating these elements, such as a programming language or special functions for embedding
them. Likely, your tools will offer a library of special effects—including zooms, wipes, and dissolves.
Many multimedia designers do not limit their toolkits to the features of a single authoring platform,
but employ a variety of applications and tools to accomplish many specialized tasks.
Configure Your Computer Workspace
When developing multimedia, it is helpful to have more than one monitor to provide lots of screen
viewing area. In this way, you can display the full‐screen working area of your project or
presentation and still have space to put your tools and other menus. This is particularly important in
an authoring system such as Flash, where the edits and changes you make in one window are
immediately visible in the presentation window—provided the presentation window is not obscured
by your editing tool! During development there is a lot of cutting and pasting among windows and
among various applications, and with an extramonitor, you can open many windows at once and
spread them out. BothMacintosh and Windows operating systems support this extra hardware.

Making Still Images

Still images may be small or large, or even full screen. They may be colored, placed at random on the
screen, evenly geometric, or oddly shaped. Whatever their form, still images are generated by the
computer in two ways: as bitmaps and as vector‐drawn graphics. Bitmaps may also be called “raster”
images. Likewise, bitmap editors are sometimes called “painting” programs. And vector editors are
sometimes called “drawing” programs. Bitmaps are used for photo‐realistic images and for complex
drawings requiring fine detail. Vector‐drawn objects are used for lines, boxes, circles, polygons, and
other graphic shapes that can be mathematically 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. Both types of images are stored in various file formats
and can be translated from one application to another or from one computer platform to another.
Typically, image files are compressed to save memory and disk space; many bitmap image file
formats already use compression within the file itself.Still images may be the most important
element of your multimediaproject. If you are designing multimedia by yourself, putyourself in the
role of graphic artist and layout designer. Take the timenecessary to discover all the tricks you can
learn about your drawing software. Computer‐literate skills in graphic art and design arevital to the
success of your project. Remember that, the user’s judgment of your work will be heavily influenced
by the work’svisual impact.

Bitmaps
A bit is the simplest element in the digital world, an electronic digit that is either on or off, or true or
false. This is referred to as binary, since only two states, on or off, are available. A map is a two
dimensional matrix of these bits. A bitmap, then, is a simple matrix of the tiny dots that form an
image and are displayed on a computer screen or printed. A one‐dimensional matrix is used to
display monochromeimages where each bit is most commonly set to blackor white. More
information is requiredto describe shades of gray and colors information that eachpicture element
might have in a color image. These picture elements commonly known aspixels can represent
varying shades of color as shown:

Bitmap Sources
Where do bitmaps come from? How are they made?
Bitmaps can be made from scratch with paint or drawing program.
You can grab a bitmap from an active computer screen with a screen captureprogram, and then
paste it into a paint program or your application.Capture a bitmap from a photo or other artwork
using a scanner.
If you do not want to make your own, you can get bitmaps from suppliersof clip art, and from
photograph suppliers who have already digitized theimages. Libraries of clip art are available on CD‐
ROMs and downloadablethrough online services. Many graphic applications are shippedwith clip art
and useful graphics. Some 3‐D modeling programsincorporate libraries of pre‐made 3‐D models into
the application, allowingyou to drag and drop common objects into a scene.You can also download
an image bitmap from a web site. Once made or acquired through any of these methods, a bitmap
can be copied, altered, e‐mailed, and otherwise used in many creative ways.
Regardlessof the source of theimage, you should always be aware of who owns thecopyright to the
image you wish to use and what is required to reproducethe image legally. Legal rights protecting
use of images from clip libraries fall into threebasic groupings. Public domain images were either
never protected by acopyright or their copyright protection has ended. Generally, these can befreely
used without obtaining permission or paying a license fee, thoughthere still may be an ownership
issue for a particular work of art such as apainting owned by an art gallery. Royalty‐free images are
purchased andthen used without paying additional license fees. Rights‐managed imagesrequire that
you negotiate with the rights holder regarding terms for usingthe image and how much you will pay
for that use. Photodisc, acommercial source of royalty‐free images, a part of gettyimages.com can
provide you with a variety of images. The Photodisc collections contain high‐resolution bitmaps with
a license for their “unlimited use.” But you should note that “unlimited use” often contains
limitations: in many cases there is an upper limit to the number of “units” of your own product that
you may distribute without paying more. However, these additional fees are usuallyreasonable, and
affect only commercial multimedia publishers.So, once you have a bitmap, you can manipulate and
adjust many of its properties such as brightness, contrast, color depth, hue, and size. You can also
cut and paste among many bitmaps using an image‐editing program. If the clip art image is high
resolution, you may discover that you can grab just a tiny portion of the high‐res image.

Bitmap Software
The abilities and features of painting and image‐editing programs range from simple to complex. The
best programs are available in versions that work the same on both Windows and Mac platforms,
and the graphic files you make can be saved in many formats, readable across platforms. Macintosh
computers do not ship with a painting tool, and Windows provides only a rudimentary Paint
program, so you will need to acquire this very important software separately. Many multimedia‐
authoring tools offer built‐in bitmap editing features. Adobe’s Photoshop,however, remains the
most widely used image‐editing tool among designers worldwide. Many designers also use a vector‐
based drawing program such asAdobe’s Illustrator, CorelDRAW, or InDesign to create curvy and
complicatedlooks that they then convert to a bitmap. You can use your imageeditingsoftware to
create original images, such as cartoons, symbols,buttons, and abstract images that have a refined
“graphic”look, but it is virtually impossible to create a realistic‐looking photofrom scratch using an
imageediting‐program. The artistic painting toolsoffered by Corel’s Painter include hundreds
ofbrushes, sprays, watercolors, inks, and textures to mimic the output ofnatural media in a bitmap.
There are also many open sources and free bitmap editors available, you just need to type “graphics
editors” ina search engine and you will find a number of them. Regardless of your program of choice,
learning to use ahigh‐powered paint program and image editor is a necessary investmentin your
multimedia future.

Capturing and Editing Images

The image you see on your monitor is a digital bitmap stored in video memory, updated about every
1/60 of a second. As you assemble images for your multimedia project, you may often need to
capture and store an image directly from your screen. The simplest way to capture what you see on
the screen at any given moment is to press the proper keys on your computer keyboard. This causes
a conversion fromthe screen buffer to a format that you can use.
Both the Macintosh and Windows environments have a clipboard,an area of memory where data
such as text and images is temporarilystored. In Windows,when you press print screen, a copy of
your screen’s image goes to theclipboard. From the clipboard, you can then paste the captured
bitmapinto an application such as Paint, which comes with Windows.On the Macintosh, the
keystroke combination command‐shift‐3creates a readable PNG‐format file named Picture and
places it onyour desktop. You can then import this file’s image into your multimediaauthoring
system or paint program. You can also press command‐control‐shift‐4 to drag a rectangle on your
screen and capture whatis inside the rectangle onto the clipboard, ready for pasting.The way to get
more creative power when manipulatingbitmaps is to use an image‐editing program, likely one of
theprograms named previously. These are the king‐of‐the‐mountainprograms that let you to be
creative. In addition to letting you enhance and make compositeimages, image‐editing tools allow
you to alter and distortimages. A color photograph of a red rose can be changed intoa purple rose,
or blue if you prefer. A small child standingnext to her older brother can be “stretched” to tower
over him.Morphing is another effect that can be used to manipulatestill images or to create
interesting and often bizarre animated transformations.

Scanning Images
After poring through countless clip art collections,you still haven’t found the unusual background
you want for a screen aboutgardening. Sometimes when you search for something too hard, you
don’trealize that it’s right in front of you. Everyday objects can be scanned andmanipulated using
image‐editing tools, such as those described in the precedingdiscussion, to create unusual,
attention‐getting effects. For example, to enliven a screen with a gardening motif, scan a mixture of
seeds, some foliage, or grass‐stained garden gloves. Open the scan in an image‐editingprogram and
experiment with different filters, the contrast, and variousspecial effects. Be creative, and don’t be
afraid to try strange combinations—sometimes mistakes yield the most intriguing results.Another
alternative to computer‐generated graphics is to create artworkusing traditional methods:
watercolors, pastels, and even crayons. Youcan then scan the image, make necessary alterations,
and tweak pixels onthe computer. Too many designers have fallen into the trap of trying todraw
detailed sketches using a mouse or drawing tablet, when a pencil orpen on paper would have
produced better results quicker.
Powerful filters and plug‐ins are offered by most image‐editing programs to manipulate bitmaps in
many differentways. Always experiment with your filters and plug‐ins

Vector Drawing
Most multimedia authoring systems make use of vector‐drawn objects such as lines, rectangles,
ovals, polygons, and text.Computer‐aided design programs have traditionally usedvector‐drawn
object systems for creating the highly complex andgeometric renderings needed by architects and
engineers. Graphic artists designing for print media use vector‐drawn objectsbecause the same
mathematics that put a rectangle on your screen canalso place that rectangle on paper without
pixilation. This requires the higher resolutionof the printer, using a page description format such as
Portable DocumentFormat (PDF).Programs for 3‐D animation also use vector‐drawn graphics.
Forexample, the various changes of position, rotation, and shading of lightrequired to spin an
extruded corporate logo must be calculated mathematically. So, during this discussion we talked
about Graphical approach, we learnt the art of organizing the tools then we discussed why we
should have two monitors connected to a multimedia workstation and lastly we learnt what bitmaps
are, where to get them and how to manipulate them. We did talk a little about vector graphics,
which is not enough, and we shall be talking about them later and not to forget we shall also be
talking about 3d graphics in detail in our next discussion. So folks, see you in our next discussion on
Vector graphics. Thank you very much.