Image development (visual arts)

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For other uses, see Image development (disambiguation).

Image development is the process of developing images for any use. It is often both a synonym for a specific process and a label for a unique combination of processes.

[edit] Term Scope

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Image development is essentially visual art usually for commercial purposes, but includes techniques not considered fine art or artistic at all depending on the usage. Image development for the purposes of technical illustration, cartography, and surveillance photography are not usually considered artistic since aesthetics are irrelevant. Some image development involves signal processing techniques such as screen capture or image scanning, which is considered imaging. Developing images by calculating fractal mathematical functions are not considered artistic despite its usage for aesthetic purposes.

[edit] Term usage

For example, photographers sometimes become digital artists. Illustrators sometimes become animators. Handicraft can be computer-aided or use computer generated imagery as a template. All of which is individually referred to as image development, or is summed up by image development.^{[citation needed]} Some skills overlap multiple forms of image development.

The term is also used to distinguish the process of preparing elements for use in media (e.g. photographs, illustrations, charts, collages) from the process of composing elements (e.g. page layout, image slicing in web development, film editing, desktop publishing) to a single presentation piece (e.g. brochure, web page, movie, billboard, poster)^{[citation needed]}. Artists who have composition skills may also have image development skills. They may do the image development themselves or collaborate with other individually skilled image developers. Collaboration with individual illustrators, photographers and designers is often useful with projects that require unique and individual image styles.

Because the word "image" can have more than one shade of meaning, the term "image development" may be confused with the development process for the corporate image called branding or positioning.^{[citation needed]} Ironically, both uses of the term may apply in the same profession such as the advertising agency using graphic image development in the process of developing the corporate image of a client. The term is also used in contrast to "image editing" which excludes the capturing of images and creation of images from scratch by sculpting or rendering. The term "image development" may have emerged due to the lack of an alternative umbrella term with as broad of a scope^{[citation needed]}. Some may find the scope of the term debatable,^[who?] depending on its usage in context.

[edit] See also

[edit] Recommended reading

Jan Roberts-Breslin , Making Media: Foundations of Sound and Image Production, March 13, 2003
Garth Gardner, Computer Graphics and Animation: History, Careers, Expert Advice, July 2002