By graphics, we will mean still pictures that have been stored in a computer somehow, and that will eventually find their way to a visual representation on paper, on a screen, printer, plotter etc. These include computer-drawn pictures, and scanned photos and pictures.

Graphics can be line drawings, gray-scale pictures or colored pictures.

Line drawings can be stored as two- dimensional arrays called bitmaps (and then they can be edited) or as vector data, approximating the picture with arcs, lines and circles.