


If you want to edit a photo or make a sweet digital painting, you should create a raster that’s capable of rendering complex color blends and mimicking the natural qualities of light. – you should create a vector that can be scaled as-needed, then output in whichever format you need at any given time. If you need a brand logo that will be used time and again in multiple media – print, digital, television, product etching, signage, etc. Ultimately, it boils down to what you’re creating and its intended use. They can contain millions of pixels and incredibly high levels of detail. Other examples include printing postcards that feature an illustrated background (vector) with a foreground photo (raster), online catalog printing that features scalable product information tables vector) alongside product images (raster), and business greeting card printing that combines corporate logos (vectors) with photos (rasters). Raster files are generally larger than vector files. This table compares some of the differences, advantage (pros), and disadvantages (cons) between raster and vector images. Why? Since vectors rely on calculations to be performed by the programs that load them, the only information they need to contain are their mathematical formulas. The most popular raster editors are Photoshop (which has limited vector capabilities) and GIMP.īecause rasterized images must contain all the information necessary to render the image (pixels, colors, arrangement of pixels, etc.), they can have large file sizes – and the higher resolution and dimensional size, the larger the file.Ĭompression can help minimize those file sizes, but compared to vectors, rasters take up a lot of space.
#Raster versus vector pdf#
Both rasters and vectors can be rendered in EPS and PDF format, where the software that created the file dictates whether it’s a raster or vector file.Ĭommon vector creation and editing programs include Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, and InkScape.

The most common vector file types are AI, CDR, and SVG. On the other hand, vector images are composed of mathematical paths, or lines, that connect. When you zoom in on a raster image, you’ll see the individual pixels that make up the image. The most common raster file types include JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, BMP, and PSD. The main difference between raster and vector images is raster images are composed of pixels, which are tiny square units of color.
