Macs All-in-One for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. Brushing Up on Painting and Drawing

In This Chapter

• Understanding painting versus drawing

• Working with common raster-editing features

• Using vector-editing features

• Choosing a painting and drawing program

• Understanding graphic file formats

The Mac is best known for its graphics capabilities. Although many companies, such as Adobe, sell virtually identical graphics programs for both Mac and Windows computers, the majority of professional artists and graphic designers use the Mac.

One common way to play with graphics is to modify an existing image. Many people capture pictures with a digital camera and then touch up those pictures in a graphics-editing program.

Another way to use graphics is to create an image from scratch. Creating graphics from scratch isn't necessarily difficult, but it can be time-consuming. As a result, creating graphics is the realm of most professionals, whereas editing graphics is common to both amateurs and professionals.

Understanding Painting versus Drawing

Two types of graphics programs are painting and drawing programs. The main difference between the two is the way the programs create, edit, and display pictures.

A painting program draws pictures using individual dots called pixels. A single picture can consist of millions of individual pixels. By changing the color of these pixels, you can change the appearance of an image.

Pictures made of pixels are called raster images. When you take a picture with a digital camera, your camera stores that picture ...