
If a photo is placed in Illustrator, a frame is drawn around it, and the whole thing is then exported as an EPS, the photo will have size limitations while the frame will not.Ģ) EPS files can still have fonts in themĪn EPS can contain fonts, and if a printer doesn’t have those fonts, the EPS will not print properly. Similarly, a raster image, like a photo, can be imported into an application such as Illustrator and ruin the party. It just means there’s a PostScript “container” wrapped around a picture made of dots, and the file name has “.eps” at the end. Vector images are always EPSs.īut watch out! There are two big caveats here:Ī raster image can be saved as an EPS from an application such as Photoshop, but that doesn’t magically make it infinitely scalable. A smooth circle is still a smooth circle at a million times its original size. Because vectors aren’t images in the normal sense, but are instead the mathematical properties of lines, curves, and color fills, they can be scaled up to any size whatsoever. Vector images, however, don’t suffer this limitation. This is why a photo that’s been blown up too much becomes “fuzzy” or “pixilated”-the computer inserts data based on surrounding dots and does a pretty poor job at it. In other words, the image’s “resolution” is too low for printing purposes. If you enlarge a raster image in, say, Photoshop, it will try to create data (i.e., more dots) to fill an area based on the pixels closest to it, and eventually it just doesn’t look right. Vector images are mathematical descriptions of objects and their properties, including shape, size, position, and color.īecause raster images are made of dots, they can’t be enlarged or “scaled up” indefinitely.


Raster, or bitmap images, are made up of dots (color, black and white, or grayscale). You may have heard the terms “raster” and “vector” images, but wondered what the difference between the two are.
