Glossary of Technical Terms

4-bit color:

A color model containingless than 16 (2^4) colors.

8-bit color:

A color model containingless than 256 (2^8) colors.

16-bit color:

A color model containingless than 65,536 (2^16) colors.

24-bit color:

A color model containingless than 16,777,216 (2^24) colors.

Accelerator:

A device or software designed to speed up operations, such as refreshing a screen image. Many PC SVGA graphics boards come furnished with accelerator chips. There are also auxiliary boards (commonly called pass-through boards) that will boost the speed of regular VGA boards.

Access Time:

The time required for a data storage device to locate and retrieve data.

Acquire:

A method oflocating images on peripheral devices (such as scanners and digital cameras) and adding them to your hard disk drive; taking screen captures.

Additive colors:

The colors red, green, and blue --when added together, they become white.

Album:

A collection of images. Albums contains shortcuts to where the images are stored on your hard disk drive. Albums in ACDSee are saved using the .ais file extension.

Algorithm:

The specific process in a computer program used to solve a particular problem.

Aliasing:

When smooth lines and curves in a digital image become distorted due to low resolution.

Analog:

Analog transmitted data can be represented electronically by a continuous wave form signal. Examples of analog items are traditional photographed images and phonograph albums.

Anti-aliasing:

The process of reducing stair-stepping by smoothing edges where individual pixels are visible.

Application:

A computer software program designed to meet a specific need.

Archive:

A collection of files gathered and often compressed for storage. You can use archiving software, such as ACDSee and ACDZip, to create and view archives.

Artifact:

An undesirable degradation of an electronic image. Usually occurs during the electronic capture, manipulation, or output of an image.

Aspect Ratio:

The ratio of horizontal to vertical dimensions of an image. (35mm slide frame is 32, TV 43, HDTV 169, 4X5 film 54).

Authentication:

A verification method employed by email servers to combat spam.

AVI:

A file with audio and video content, the standard was made by Apple.