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File Formats

Everyone is always asking what is the difference in the different types of files. Which type is the best? Obviously there is never an easy answer. Again, it depends on what you plan to do with the file.

BMP

The Bitmap file format is used for bitmap graphics on the Windows platform only. Unlike other file formats, which store image data from top to bottom and pixels in red/green/blue order, the BMP format stores image data from bottom to top and pixels in blue/green/red order. This means that if memory is tight, BMP graphics will sometimes appear drawn from bottom to top.

Compression of BMP files is not supported, so they are usually very large.

PICT

Also known as PICT I. This is the original Macintosh format. This format was developed early on and is only eight bits or 256 indexed colors.

A newer format, PICT II files can contain gray scale information and files from 4- to 24-bits to produce the highest quality level.
TIFF

This stands for Tagged Image File Format. It has been adopted by the American National Standards Insitute (ANSI) and International Organization of Standards (ISO). This file forms high-resolution raster images of digital pages by converting vectored images to bits. They are large files, but easily compressed.

There are at least six possible varieties of Tiff files; but, there are no applications that can support all TIFF variations.

The TIFF format uses 6 different encoding routines:
- No-compression
- Huffman
- Pack Bits
- LZW
- Fax Group 3
- Fax Group 4


In addition it differentiates between types of images in 3 different categories:
- Black and white
- Gray scaled
- Colored


The TIFF format supports LZW method compression for image types.
(This is the same compression used by the GIF format for indexed color.)

Characteristics:

TIFF - with no compression format supports 1, 4, 8, 24 bits per pixel.
TIFF - Huffman format supports 1 bit per pixel.
TIFF - Pack Bits format supports 1 bit per pixel.
TIFF - LZW format supports 4, 8, 24 bits per pixel.
TIFF - Fax Group 3 format supports 1 bit per pixel.
TIFF - Fax Group 4 format supports 1 bit per pixel.

 
EPS  
GIFF  
JPEG  
DCS  
PostScrip  
PDF  
Miscellaenous formats  

 

 

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