Without getting too technical, ‘Raster’ files are made up of little square ‘picture elements’ or pixels - pretty-much like your screen / TV / a chessboard. Files of this type are also called bitmaps. The following file types are bitmap file types (not to be confused with the bitmap file type .bmp - though as the name suggests this is also a bitmap!), printable by ImagePrint Lite and Raster versions: Native Photoshop (.psd), Jpeg (.jpg) and Tiff (.tif).

Postscript files, on the other hand, are used to describe ‘vector’ graphics. Vector graphics are scaleable, and made up by describing a starting point, direction, distance, line-type, and so on. Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files, Postscript (.ps) and Encapsulated Postscript (.eps) files all use vector graphics.

Each type of file has its strengths and weaknesses. Photographers will normally find they do most of their work with bitmap / raster graphics inside applications like Photoshop (photos from digital camera or scanners are all bitmaps). However, some people like to use applications like InDesign or Quark for page-layout applications, and these tend to be more oriented towards vector graphics (even though they can contain raster graphics).

To make matters more confusing, graphics appplications like Photoshop now include certain amounts of ‘vector’ information; like Shapes and Paths (and indeed, vector-based fonts). However, in the case of Photoshop, the underlying engine is really oritentated towards bitmaps.

Please note that MWORDS has closed. We aim to retain these support pages in the hope that they may benefit our past customers, but regret that we can no longer offer further comment or support in relation to the information above.