Images can enhance a document and give it much more of a visual impact. They can be anything from a simple pencil sketch to a full colour photograph. Before they can be added to a document produced on a computer, an image on paper or other physical medium needs to be digitised. This can be done using a scanner or digital camera. The digital image can be saved onto a computer hard drive or other storage device and then loaded into whatever documents you want. In the days before digital cameras were able to produce good quality images, photographs were produced by developing and printing... Show more

Images can enhance a document and give it much more of a visual impact. They can be anything from a simple pencil sketch to a full colour photograph. Before they can be added to a document produced on a computer, an image on paper or other physical medium needs to be digitised. This can be done using a scanner or digital camera. The digital image can be saved onto a computer hard drive or other storage device and then loaded into whatever documents you want.

In the days before digital cameras were able to produce good quality images, photographs were produced by developing and printing films. It took a while for films to be processed and many people ended up being disappointed with their photos as they were not perfectly focused or did not have the correct exposure.

Unless they are printed to a high standard, photos from films, particularly colour films, could fade within a few years. With digital photos, they don't fade over time, you can see the results instantly and re-take a picture if the first shot didn't work properly. You can also use a graphics package to sharpen up slightly blurred images, correct errors in exposure or modify the colours to get exactly the result that you want.

Desktop publishing (also known as DTP) processes text and images. It combines a personal computer and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) page layout software to create documents for printing. You could produce leaflets of different sizes, greetings cards, business cards, posters, magazines and even books if you wanted to. It is much better at these tasks than word processing software because you can control the layout very precisely. If you have ever tried to use word processing software for this purpose, you will have found that keeping everything exactly where you want it can be quite tricky.

When using DTP software correctly, the different elements are often created with other programs, saved as separate files and imported. Text is produced with a word processor and images in graphics software. It is possible to use the DTP program to enter text and manipulate images but that is less efficient. The layout is made using frames which can be positioned exactly aligned to a grid. They can be locked in place. The different elements are loaded into the frames and the text formatted as required.

Related Test: KS3 ICT Practice Test: Processing Text and Images

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