Bitmap support

Going beyond just vector graphics capabilities.

Although we’re looking at vector-based graphics packages instead of the bitmapped software used for editing photos, there are times when some limited support of bitmaps is useful, say for including photos of staff in an organisational chart. All the software reviewed here enables you to import bitmapped images for this purpose, and the basic editing functions available enable you to move, resize and rotate them. Some software also enables you to crop images but, even if there’s no specific crop bitmap function, with most reasonably featured vector graphics software you’ll be able to find some way of achieving this.

While we wouldn’t recommend using any vector-based software for dedicated image editing use – something like GIMP is far more appropriate – some of the packages included here do offer a bit more than the basics in terms of support for bitmaps and sometimes a lot more. This might streamline your workflow by not requiring you to edit images in other software before importing them to your vector-based editor. Gravit is particularly strong here, enabling you to adjust brightness and contrast, and even fine-tune colours and remove noise. While Inkscape doesn’t offer all this natively, the raster extension adds all Gravit’s bitmap editing capabilities and a lot more. Libreoffice Draw also has advanced features in this area – mostly artistic effects.

Another useful feature associated with bitmaps is to convert them to vectors. This is variously called tracing, vectorising, or converting to polygons. Once converted to vectors or polygons, all the usual vector editing facilities become available. This functionality is available in Inkscape, Libreoffice Draw and Gravit.