What is Vector?

Vector is a computer image file that uses paths with a start and end point. With a vector program such as Adobe Illustrator or Flash you can add or remove point or nodes to the path that will allow you to bend, twist, stretch, straighten the path into any object your heart desires. People often confuse Adobe Illustrator with Adobe Photoshop or don't know the fundamental difference between the two programs.

The alternative to vector graphic files are raster or bitmap based graphic files. Photographs or jpgs/jpegs, gifs, bmps, tiffs, pngs and many other popular computer graphic files are raster/bitmap based images which use pixels to represent an image. Each pixel in a bitmap has a defined color value and most photographs contain thousands or millions of pixels which comprise the picture. Adobe Photoshop is a raster based software program that allows you to edit raster files such as photographs. Vector graphics tend to have less colors and can be scaled

One of the advantages of vector files is that they can be scaled to any size and not loose their image quality. This is because vector files use mathematical calculations of the above explained paths to resize the image. Here is a visual example.

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