You have a part time job in a local off-licence. It is one of a family-run chain of stores in your area.

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1 This is the first of a number of assignment for the graphics segment of my national diploma course. The Scenario has been set below, this document was completed back in Guidance/Information You have a part time job in a local off-licence. It is one of a family-run chain of stores in your area. The owners have decided to produce some marketing material for the shop. They want to produce some graphics to be used on a printed colour leaflet to be put through letterboxes in the area, on the website they are hoping to have created and on a poster to display in their shops. The owner of the chain has a computer which he hopes to use to produce the graphics needed for leaflets and website. The owners have asked your advice on what to do to the existing system to make it suitable for manipulating graphics. They hope that if the system can be upgraded you will be able to produce the graphics that they require. Task 1 The owners want you to explain the system requirements needed to capture and manipulate digital graphics e.g. Mouse Screen Graphics tablet Digital camera Scanner Flash cards USB storage devices For each item identified you need to explain its use, reasons for its inclusion and an identification of its features that make it suitable for use with digital graphics. Use images to support your work. 1 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

2 Task 2 The owners are also interested in how hardware computer components affect the performance of a computer system used to manipulate graphics. They have specifically asked for information about the hard drive, graphics card, processor(s) and RAM. Task 3 You now need to explain the software used for digital graphics. You can enhance your information by using screenshots. You need to explain the differences between: Vector graphics software such as CorelDRAW Bitmap software such as Paint Photo manipulation software such as Photoshop Graphics facilities embedded within other application packages such as Word. You must also compare the limitations of two different software packages used for the capture, manipulation or storage of graphics. Task 4 Below is the specification of the owner s pc. They need to know if their existing system will be up to the task of producing the type of images they need and whether it should be upgraded. Intel Pentium D Dual Core X2 CPU (5.3 Ghz) VIA Chipset 1066 Mhz Motherboard slots available; AGP8X (1), PC1 (3), RAM (2); ports available: LAN (1), USB (6) 512 MB RAM 80 GB HDD (SATA300) 18X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer & Dual format Onboard UniChrome PRO 3D Graphics with 64MB shared memory Mouse and keyboard 15 flat screen Cheap inkjet printer Compile a report on how suitable their existing system is for the task and whether it should be upgraded. Please identify two graphics-related hardware upgrades to the system and describe potential benefits they bring as well as their limitations. Include a section evaluating the impact of new output media. You will need to research how output media e.g. large flat screens, printer technologies, are developing. Then evaluate them against cost, speed, usage and any other criteria you discover. 2 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

3 Task 1 Mouse The mouse simply moves the curser on the screen for manipulating images. This allows affects to be added and removed from. There are currently 3 types of mouse on the market, ball, optical, and laser. For editing pictures you would want a mouse with a high dpi and the freedom to move easily, that s why I would recommend using a wireless laser mouse. mage sourced from: Screen Screen size, higher resolution monitors allow more information to be simultaneously displayed on the screen. Advantages: Less time is spent scrolling a window. More data is displayed on the screen so it means fewer errors are made. Disadvantages: Putting more information on the same size screen means that text, images, icons, and other data is all smaller. The result of that would be that the information will be harder to interpret. Advantages of using a TFT monitor over a CRT Monitor: LCDs consume less power. Do not produce electromagnetic radiation as CRTs do. Flicker less than CRTs mage sourced from: Are light and small in size 3 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

4 Disadvantages of using a TFT monitor over a CRT Monitor: Poorer viewing angle More Expensive. Response time is slower than CRTs. Colour performance is less reliable. Graphics tablet The Graphics Tablet is very similar to a mouse. It allows you to control what is going on, on screen. But yet it gives you the freedom to draw images, touch up and edit photos. They can also be used for jotting quick notes down on applications. They are very user friendly, but they are not a necessary need for an amateur user. Digital camera This is a camera that does not use film, but instead stored the photographs in a digital format in memory on the camera. These images can then be downloaded to a computer. mage sourced from: Scanner A scanner is needed when turning a photograph in a digital image on the computer. The price of the scanner varies on the quality of the scanner. A scanners quality is measured by how many dots per inch it recognises (DPI). mage sourced from: mage sourced from: 4 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

5 Flash cards A small flash memory card is like a portable hard drive. The memory chips are enclosed in a plastic case and retain data after they are removed from the system. The most common uses for these are in laptops, pagers, handheld computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and audio players. There are several different form factors of flash cards, including Compact Flash, Smart Media, PCMCIA, and Small Form Factor Flash Card. USB storage devices Known as a memory stick, they are commonly used in the transfer of images, and graphic material. This form of transport is very quick and simple. Also rather than transporting data they are used as back up devices, this enables users to back up there post important images and graphical material, which reduces the chances of losing it. Task 2 Image sourced from: Image sourced from: Hard drive This is where all the images that you have created are stored. Because images take up a lot of room, this means you generally you need a larger space to save the data to. It s crucial that you have enough space to save otherwise the computer will be slow due to the lack of space. A good size hard drive for a professional individual manipulating graphics and images of a daily bases would be around 400 GB. Graphics Card Many motherboards now come with built in graphics card; the onboard graphics card is very basic and is only capable with the most basic task such as word processing. This would struggle to run image manipulation programs because editing programs are very graphics hungry; you would end up with the system lagging. Really a computer designed for graphics manipulation would contain a separate PCI express graphics card; this would cope much better with the strain. Processors Generally when manipulating images you will have more than one application open, these applications are very power hungry. Having a quad core processor would be beneficial for the user as its great at multi-tasking and will reduce lag created by the number of applications open. RAM RAM (Random Access Memory) is where applications and programs store information that is being used, that has not been saved to the hard drive. The RAM does not store information once the computer is switch off it is cleared. Applications designed for manipulating graphics and editing images, take up a lot of space when open. A professional individual manipulating graphics on a day to day basis would have at least 2 GB of RAM memory. 5 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

6 Task 3 Corel Draw CorelDraw is the leading product in the vector graphic market. Vector graphic is the format that designers create logos and other computer graphical images, other than photographs. The main reason why vector graphics is so good is because of its scalable capability. It is extremely good for designing promotional products, because when needing to increase the size of an image, it doesn t go blurry, it retains it qualities. Vector images are not uploaded and used for websites, because the size of the image is far too large, so the recommended way to deal with this is to create you graphical logo as a vector image and when you re happy with the design convert it to bitmap for upload. Vector images are not based on pixels like bitmaps, they produce mathematical points where colour is added, so when you increase the size the program will calculate the increase and add pixels to the image to keep it looking good, and not becoming distorted. Here is an example of how a vector image does not get distorted when enlarged. Images sourced from: ign/musiq.jpg 6 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

7 Photo shop Photoshop is very good at manipulating images, as it has many complex features which enables the user to change images in hundreds of different ways. This is the program that professional graphical designer would choose to use over any other application, this is because of the sheer number of things that are possible to do with the program. This product does not come cheap the new CS3 addition of photo shop comes to a cost of The program can edit 23 different file types from bitmap images to j-pegs. It s quite amazing what the program can do. The saying The camera never lies is not true anymore with digital photography enhanced with this program it allows you to add and take objects out of photos, and after never notice the difference. Below is a photograph that has been edited, It shows how that the bike has been cropped out of the image before and placed in the image after. It shows the use of layers just one of the many more features that the application has more than paint. Layers is where you put one thing on top of another, the bike has been placed on the top of a sunset photograph. You would never be able to edit an image like this in a basic program like paint or Microsoft Office, because they have been designed only to perform certain basic tasks. Image before Image after Images sourced from: 7 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

8 Paint Paint is a very basic bitmap editing tool it allows users to edit images, it has very few options to change when editing images, and it s a very basic application. Paint changes the colour of each individual pixel, to create an image. When enlarging an image with paint it doesn t produce new pixels it will stretch the preexisting pixels, this makes the image becomes blurry and distorted. Below is an example, you can see the original picture that the quality is excellent, I ve enlarge a small part of the image using paint, because the program is pixel base, it means that each individual pixel is stretched and enlarged, which gives. 8 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

9 Graphics facilities embedded within other application Microsoft Office Word is a very good example of having built in editing tools; it allows the user to just do the basics to images without getting into depth. It lets the application user to add boarders, crop images, and rotate the image just to mention a few simple. This is a good feature to the application released by Microsoft as many people don t have dedicated photo manipulation software on their computer Once you have edited a picture in Microsoft office 2007 it does not give you an option of saving it separately as a J-peg file, or a bitmap image. The figure below shows an example what Microsoft Office 2007 has to offer in the way of editing images. This example to show the use of the shadow effect built in to Microsoft Office There are a number of different effects on offer, Original Image Edited Images To the right is another example of what can be achieved in Microsoft Office 2007 by changing the contrast. Image sourced from: 9 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

10 Comparing the use of Microsoft Office 2007 and Photoshop in graphical manipulation The Microsoft Office Word 2007 is not specifically designed for graphical manipulation; its main functionality is a word processor. It has the feature included within the application to speed up editing of images and photographs that people inset regularly into their document, this in turn speed up the process rather than loading another program just to do simple tasks such as cropping images, this saves a lot of time. Photoshop has been design specifically by Adobe to edit and manipulate photographs. Limitations of using Microsoft Office Word 2007 base editor is that you can t actually save the images that you have edited within the application, yet using Photoshop you re given the choice of 23 different save formats. But you could argue if you just need to crop images for a presentation it will be quicker to edit the images in word, because you don t have to save each individual image. With Photoshop you can change the image in so many different ways; you can make photographs look like water colour paintings, this takes only seconds to do, there are many other effects that you can add to your photographs. The downside of using Photoshop is that it is such a powerful program that it requires a lot of processing speed, and a large amount of RAM memory to run at full capacity, unlike Microsoft Office Word 2007 which is simple and does not require much ram memory or fast processing speed. The minimum system requirements a professional graphics designer would be a duel core processer and 2GB of RAM. 10 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

11 Task 4 The business requires a system to produce high quality graphics. As this is a business productivity that is important, therefore it is important to have a good quality system. The existing system is under powered for the expected use. The existing system can be upgraded it may be worth considering redeploying the existing system elsewhere with in the business. It would be fine for word processing or accounting functions, but it s not viable for the use of creating graphical images, posters, and website material. The two items of the system that I would upgrade that you and the company would benefit the most from would be the printer and the RAM (Random Access Memory). Printer The cheap ink jet printer is just not simply right for the job; it would be adequate for a home user. In the company the printer will be doing a lot of work so it s important that you purchase the right printer for the job. As you are going to be using the printer for doing a number of jobs, printing posters, leaflets, and other advertising material you are going to have to find a printer that is capable to do all those tasks. Posters are big, it s no good having only an A4 printer, and you need at least an A3 colour printer to produce good quality pictures. Leaflets can be printed on A5 sheets, that s quite simply to do but generally you are looking for speed when printing leaflets, as you need to produce a lot to post though the doors of the local community around each shop. Also you need to think about cost of ownership, this means how economic the printer is, how many sheets are you able to print per cartridge. A hidden cost can be the consumables for the printer, for example the cartridges could cost a lot of money. Thinking in the long term as well what is the expected life of the printer. Because you are looking for big size prints as well as speed its going to cost more for a printer which combines both but they are extremely expensive prices above 1000 this isn t cost effective for your business. I recommend purchasing a high quality A3 colour printer, because you get the quality for the posters and printing the leaflets at an A5 size means you can print four on an A3 sheet of paper which Is a cost effective way of getting fast prints. The printer that I recommend is the Epson R1800 colour printer; you can purchase the printer for the price of (with cartridges included) and also comes with 12 months warranty. It can print 12 A3 colour sheets a minute so relating that to leaflet, the printer will be able to print 48 a minute. It has a very good print resolution of 5760 x 1440 dpi, which is suburb image quality. Plus new cartridges are cheap at only 9.49 each, and a pack of 500 sheets of A3 paper costs Image sourced from: 11 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved

12 RAM 512MB of RAM is just simply not enough memory for what you re looking to do, it would be acceptable if you where just using the machine for the occasional letter and . Upgrading your computer's RAM is one of the quickest, most efficient and most costeffective ways to boost performance. The computer will defiantly need the RAM memory upgrading because you are going to be running multiple high powered programs. The RAM upgrade is extremely simple, even sometimes it takes longer taking the case of the machine off than replacing the ram. Too little RAM also can create a bottleneck when printing large images, and long documents, printing speed is key for this computer. Replacing the RAM memory has a big difference on print speed. For Example you could have the laser ink jet printer, but it won t reach its optimum performance until the RAM is upgraded. The more memory you have the more that can be buffered, and the faster you will print. The amount of RAM memory that I recommend you 2GB as that ample enough to manage a number of high powered applications open at once, Upgrading to 2GB of RAM is extremely cheap at only this gives you four times as much memory as before, doubling the RAM memory to 1GB costs to me it makes more sense to pay the extra for a much quicker machine with less lag. Image sourced from: How is output media developing? Large flat screens are becoming more and more common now a days because they are becoming cheaper to purchase, with a high quality 22 inch TFT screen only costing , this is a top of the range widescreen model. Images from: In earlier years when the flat screen TFT was first introduced it was small (15 ) and the colour quality was poor, yet the monitors still cost best part of 200. Companies have invested a lot of time and money into developing the monitors and now have succeeded as the old CRT monitor is becoming obsolete. Printer technology has developed greatly over the last couple of years; the price of a new basic good quality printer is less than Epson is the market leader in printer sales, this is because as well as the printers being extremely cheap and reliable they only charge between 6.99 and 9.99 for individual ink cartridges. Also companies have developed build in memory card readers, rather than placing you memory stick into the computer you plug it directly into the front of the printer and it prints the images direct from there, the computer doesn t even `Image from: need to be on. Previously basic printers and cartridges where a lot more expensive looking at for the fc rprinter and per cartridge. 12 aem design UK 2010 All Rights Reserved