This lesson goes through the key ideas behind computer
images. You will need to be able to surf the internet. You will also find
this lesson easier if you have attended "My Computer and Explorer",
but it is not necessary.
When I use the word image, it is what we would normally
call a picture.
Creating a folder.
Firstly we are going to create a folder on your computer.
Why? In order to save an image in it. We will then edit that image and
see what happens to the image, and the way it is stored.
Go to My Computer. Click it and open it.
We want to create a folder on the C: Drive called whatever you want. I
will call mine Greg's pictures.
Click on the C: Drive (It may be called Local Disk or Hard Disk).
When you have C: in the address bar, go to File >
New > Folder
Type in the folder name when you have created the folder.
If you can't type over the name, go to File > Rename and do it again.
We will now use this folder to store our images in.
Finding an image to edit.
Go on the internet by clicking on Internet Explorer
(A big blue e icon).
Find a picture anywhere you like on the internet.
If you can't find any, then visiting a news website
is good. The Guardian's website is called: www.newsunlimited.co.uk.
Once you have found a picture, hover over it with the
mouse pointer.
The pointer should turn from a white arrow to a white hand.
Right click on your mouse.
There many choices, and I could write a list of what they all mean.
Today we want to actually save a copy of the picture
as a file.
Choose Save Picture as.
When you are in the Save Picture box, click on file
name and give it a name that you will remember.
It will save the file as a Bitmap(*.bmp) (normally).
We will look at what a Bitmap is later.
Do not select Save Target as as this simply saves the
Webpage, not the image.
Image Editing.
We are now going to open the image that we have saved.
We could go to the folder that we created and open it, or we could open
the image editing program that we want and open it from there.
There a many image editing programs - Paint, Photoshop
etc. Some are more advanced that others, some are for different uses,
but today we will use Imaging.
Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > Imaging.
Now go to File > Open.
We want to find the folder we just created. Mine should
be called C:\Greg's Pictures.
Select the little black down arrow to the right of the
"Look in" box.
Click on C:
Now click on the image you saved.
Firstly we are going to save this image as different
image types.
Go to File > Save as.
We want to save one as a JPEG, keep the same name as
the images will have different File Extensions.
A File Extension is the type of file it is. Word documents are called
.doc, Excel spreadsheets are called .xls.
In Save as type: select Jpeg.
Now do the same with the following image formats.
GIF
BITMAP
TIFF
PNG
PCX
We will now look at our folder that we created.
Open the folder and go to View > Details. This show us the file size.
Now lets look at the size of the files.
If you want to save an image onto a disk, you need to chose a file that
is smaller than your available space. We can now see how much memory the
images take up.
Try clicking the different version of the image and
see what program opens them.
Different file types are suitable to different programs, for example jpeg
go best with Internet Explorer.
Bitmaps are opened with Imaging or Paint.
Let's now use paint to do a bit of basic editing.
We will try to look at some of these aspects, but they are best left for
another course:
Resolution.
Black and White
Colour
Contrast
Basically the more details, the more colourful the image,
the more memory space you will use.
Other ways of creating images is to use Digital Photography,
draw your own images or take them from the internet.