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Bitmap

From Jacci Bear's Desktop Publishing Glossary, for 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 graphics software 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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