A raster image is made of thousands of little dots, or pixels. Creating or editing an image with dots allows you to provide for rich detail in an image. Because every dot can be a different color, you can allow for any kind of color change.
Raster images are wonderful for rendering rich, full-color images, like photographs. Raster-based programs do have some drawbacks, though:
- Raster images are file-heavy. All of the zeros and ones that are used to make up each pixel result in large files sizes. Your computer must keep track of the zeros and ones and must change each one when editing. This is memory-intensive and may cause slower editing.
- Rasters do not resize well. When you resize a raster image, the pixels just get larger, making the image appear distorted and chunky/grainy.
