Chapter 19: Work with Bitmap Art in Illustrator

Overview

Illustrator s unique role in the world of digital art is an unsurpassed ability to create and edit vector graphics. As discussed at the beginning of this book, vector artwork can be scaled, it generally creates smaller size files, and it allows unmatched editing of curves, shapes , and text.

Even with all those advantages, some artwork does not lend itself to a vector format. Photographs, for example, are composed of many tiny dots, and it is usually not effective or efficient to try to convert them to vector images. Instead, such raster-based (bitmap) images are usually edited in Illustrator s cousin ”Photoshop.

Tip  

Raster? Bitmap? They refer to the same thing. Bitmap or raster graphics are digital images in which the content of the image is defined by dots mapped (located) along a raster (grid). The term bitmap (as in a map of bits) puts emphasis on the fact that bits (dots or pixels) are mapped, while the term raster emphasizes that a grid is used to locate the dots or pixels. The two terms are used interchangeably in this book.

For serious raster editing, you ll want to use Adobe Photoshop or a similar bitmap editing program, such as Jasc Paint Shop Pro or Corel PHOTO-PAINT. The reason that there are bitmap editing tools in Illustrator is that many illustrations are hybrids ” combinations of both vector and bitmap artwork. For instance, the CD cover in Figure 19-1 combines a photo ( stylized in Photoshop) with type layout better managed in Illustrator.

Figure 19-1: The image is from Photoshop, the text from Illustrator.