Painting and drawing tools, as well as 3-D modelers, are perhaps the most important items in the toolkit because, of all the multimedia elements, the graphical impact of the project will likely have the greatest influence on the end user. If the artwork is amateurish, or flat and uninteresting, both the creator and the users will be disappointed.
Painting software, such as Photoshop, Fireworks, and Painter, is dedicated to producing crafted bitmap images. Drawing software, such as CorelDraw, FreeHand, Illustrator, Designer, and Canvas, is dedicated to producing vector-based line art easily printed to paper at high resolution.
Some software applications combine drawing and painting capabilities, but many authoring systems can import only bitmapped images. Typically, bitmapped images provide the greatest choice and power to the artist for rendering fine detail and effects, and today bitmaps are used in multimedia more often than drawn objects. Some vector based packages such as Macromedia’s Flash are aimed at reducing file download times on the Web, and may contain both bitmaps and drawn art. The anti-aliased character shown in the bitmap of Color Plate 5 is an example of the fine touches that improve the look of an image.
Look for these features in a drawing or painting packages:
• Scalable dimensions, so you can resize, stretch, and distort both large and small bitmaps
• Paint tools to create geometric shapes, from squares to circles and from curves to complex polygons
• Ability to pour a color, pattern, or gradient into any area
• Ability to paint with patterns and clip art
• Customizable pen and brush shapes and sizes
• Eyedropper tool that samples colors
• Auto trace tool that turns bitmap shapes into vector-based outlines
• Support for scalable text fonts and drop shadows
• Multiple undo capabilities, to let you try again
• Painting features such as smoothing coarse-edged objects into the background with anti-aliasing, airbrushing in variable sizes, shapes, densities, and patterns; washing colors in gradients; blending; and masking
• Support for third-party special effect plug-ins
• Object and layering capabilities that allow you to treat separate elements independently
• Zooming, for magnified pixel editing
• All common color depths: 1-, 4-, 8-, and 16-, 134-, or 313- bit color, and grayscale
• Good color management and dithering capability among color depths using various color models such as RGB, HSB, and CMYK
• Good palette management when in 8-bit mode
• Good file importing and exporting capability for image formats such as PIC, GIF, TGA, TIF, WMF, JPG, PCX, EPS, PTN, and BMP
