GFX Glossary
Anti-Aliasing: option that makes the transition between two different things (usually a picture and the background) smoother. Anti-aliasing the edges on a graphic image will make the edges appear smooth, not jagged.
Bevel: it's an effect that gives the image a raised appearance by applying light colors and dark colors to the inside and outside edges, much like a button.
Blending: is the transition between two different layers (usually the stock and the background).
BMP: a format that stores the graphic as a bunch of dots, maping all the pixels, that genererates all the picture.
Border: in a tag, it's the outline of the whole signature.
Brushing: general term used to describe an effect made by using brushes. Tutorials can be found here and here.
CMYK: short for Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black. It's the format used in printers to analyze the colors. For exmaple: black is 0-0-0-100 (which means: 0% of cyan, magenta and yellow, and 100% of black).
Collabration: also known as collab. it is where 2 GFX makers do a GFX together to get the best out of a GFX and also to mix 2 sorts of styles together.
Contrast: as the name say, it's the difference between the colors here. A image with high contrast is one that has many opposing colors in there, like many shades and brightness.
Feathering:it's a kind of blending where the edge of the image gradually dissipates itself, like in a blur.
Focal Point:basically, it's the place of an image that you'll look at first. It's pretty much like the most important part of the picture that people will look at first and focus. No focal point means that the picture looks pretty much all the same, and there no place to stare at.
Frame: in an animation, it's a single image in a sequence of many, that "animates" the graphic.
GIF: Stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It's a format of file that allows up to 256 colors, but allows simple transparencies and animations.
Gradient: gradual transition between 2 different colors.
Hue: it's the color itself. It's scaled in degrees, using a "color wheel" as basis. Here's the scale.
JPEG (or JPG): short for Joint Photographic Experts Group. Most used file format. It has a nice balance between the quality and file size. However, it doesn't allow any kind of transparencies.
Manipulation: as the name says, it's a work where the stock (main picture) has been altered in some way, so to distort the image and create a completely new one.
Outline:trace of the outer edge of text or a graphic image.
PNG: stands for Portable Network Graphics format. It's the best file type in quality terms, having no loss in quality when compared to the original picture, plus allowing millions of colors and fade-out transparencies (alpha channel). However, it's the biggest one in file size, and doesn't show up properly on the Internet Explorer.
Render: generally speaking, it's an image created by a 3D modelling program. One popular type of render are the abstracts ones, that many people use to create lighting effects. In some forums, renders are popularly known as cutted images, saves as PNG, but that's a misconcept.
RGB: stands for Red-Green-Blue. Color system used for monitors, where each color is defined by those the basic ones. The scale is defined from 0 (no color) to 255 (full color), for each one. 0-0-0 is black, while 255-255-255 means white, while just 255-0-0 is red.
Saturation: the intensity of a color. A hihe saturated picture has very bright, vivid colors, while low saturated colors are dull and neutral (close to gray). No saturation would mean grayscale.
Stock: in simple words, those are the main images of a work. They range from character art to real people.
Tag: signature image. Although they're commonly known by just "sigs".
Typography: it's the text itself, analyzed by its font, size and colours (plus any additional work over it).
Vector Graphic: file format that will store all the data of a picture through equations and mathematical symbols, as to define the lines, shapes and colors.
This should guide few GFX beginners to the right way.
Thats all for now folks
Credit goes to DarkilexCore aka darkile from Da Web/Tech GFX
