PE: The Digital Art ABC - A to E

Project Educate: The Digital Art ABC - A to E

A

• Adobe: Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company focused on the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more-recent foray towards rich Internet application software development. Some of their products are: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Flash...
• Airbrushing (digital): A digital painting technique that achieves the result of a real airbrushing using specific brushes from different painting softwares. It is characterized by the smooth result it offers.
• Action: An action is a series of tasks that you play back on a single file or a batch of files - menu commands, palette options, tool actions... to make your software (Photoshop, Illustrator...) perform these tasks automatically. Photoshop and Illustrator come with default actions installed, but you can record, edit and customize new actions depending on your needs.

B

• Blur: It's a Photoshop tool (filter) that allows you to soften images or portions of images, eliminating dust and flaws, soften print texture and film grain, clear up skin on portraits... and many other great effects.
• Brushes (in software): Software Brushes are imitations of the real-life brushes to achieve similar effects painting digitally to what we'd get painting traditionally. Each sowtware comes with a ser of default brushes but most of them allow the artist to create their own custom brushes and load them into the programme.
• Bitmap: In computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. They're usually named with the file extension .BMP.
• Burn tool: It's a Photoshop tool based on a traditional photographer's technique for regulating exposure on specific areas of a print. The burn tool increases the exposure to darken areas. The more you paint over an area with the Burn tool, the darker it becomes.

C

• CMYK: It's a subtractive color model (a color model that explains the mixing of paints, dyes, inks, and natural colorants to create a full range of colors), used in color printing, which refers to the 4 inks used in color printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (Black).
• Canvas: It's the working (drawing, painting, editing...) area of our creative software. It's rezisable and usually a rectangle with transparent or blank default background.
• Corel Corporation: Corel Corporation from the abbreviation ("Cowpland Research Laboratory") is a computer software company headquartered in Ontario, Canada that specializes in graphics processing, similar to Adobe Systems. It is known for producing software titles such as CorelDRAW, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Designer, etc.

D

• Digital (systems): Digital systems are based in the use of discrete values (0 and 1) to represent information. Although digital representations are discrete, the information represented can be either discrete, such as numbers, letters or icons, or continuous, such as sounds, images, and other measurements of continuous systems.
• Dodge tool: It's a Photoshop tool based on a traditional photographer's technique for regulating exposure on specific areas of a print. The dodge tool hold back light to lighten an area on the image. The more you paint over an area with the Dodge tool, the lighter it becomes.

E

• Eye Dropper tool: It's a tool present in almost every creative software used for sampling individual pixels in a pre-determined area. It allows you to select the colour of the pixel in a precise and effective way.
  
• Editing (Digital image): It's the process of altering and image using digital media, even if the image has been created traditionally or it's an analog photograph. Digital editing is done using graphic software programs such as Photoshop, Gimp, Illustrator, Painter, etc.

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