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Bitmap

By Jacci Howard Bear, About.com

Bitmap clip art and photo enlargments

Bitmap clip art and photo at normal size and enlarged to show the individual pixels.

J. James
Definition: A bitmap is a type of graphic composed of pixels (picture element) in a grid. Each pixel or "bit" contains color information for the image. Bitmap graphics formats have a fixed resolution which means that resizing a bitmap graphic can result in distortion and jagged edges.

Some common bitmap formats are GIF, JPG or JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PICT, PCX, and BMP. Photo-editors or image-editing such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint are designed for creating and editing bitmap graphics.

Pronunciation: [BIT-map]
Also Known As: raster | fixed resolution image
Alternate Spellings: bit map
Examples: Bitmap images look best used at the size at which created. Making bitmaps larger usually distorts them.

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