Graphics Formats Explained

First published 1996.

Last modified 01-Apr-2008.
 

There are a lot of great ways to get confused while using computers - and one
of the best is figuring out graphics file formats. As with so many areas of
computing, standards for graphic files are great because there are so many to
choose from.

They're all different and incompatible, of course, but many programs can load
and/or save a wide selection. By and large, you can tell what kind of file
you've got by looking at the suffix - the letters, usually three, after the dot in
the filename.

Better graphics software actually looks at the file data to determine what kind
of file it's dealing with, but Windows software is shamefully deficient in this
regard; rename foo.tif to foo.pcx and it's likely that nothing on a Windows PC
will be able to load it.

ADI - AutoCAD's Device-Independent Binary Plotter Format, a vector format

generated by AutoCAD.

AI - Adobe Illustrator's metafile format, which is actually a flavour

of Encapsulated Postscript.

AWD - Microsoft Fax At Work format, a black-and-white (one bitplane) format

for storing fax images.

BMP - This is the Microsoft Windows bitmap format, also used in OS/2. It's a

fairly compact (compression is optional, but usually turned on) format for
images up to 24 bit. BMP is the native bitmap format for the Windows
environment.
CALS - Computer Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support Raster Format; a
longwinded, seldom-seen military-spec two colour document storage format.
Used in Pentagon archives, and that sort of thing.

CAM - Casio Camera, the native file format of Casio's QV-series digital
cameras.

CGM - Computer Graphics Metafile, an American National Standards

Institute/International Standards Organization metafile format for images of
pretty much any kind.

CLP - This is the format you get when you save a file from the Windows 3.x
Clipboard. It is very, very large, and very very, inefficient - and, what's more,
you can only view a CLP file if you're in the same resolution as the person
who made it, and are using the same number of colours. CLP is an image
format that should never be allowed to touch a disk. Do not use it.

CT - The most popular of the Scitex image formats, Scitex Continuous Tone
images are very large and intended for use with Scitex's professional film-
printing units, which produce high-grade output for publication.

CUT - The orphaned 256 colour format used by the old Doctor Halo paint
program.

DIB - This is an orphaned Windows image format. It stands for Device

Independent Bitmap and was part of Microsoft's Great Plan for Windows 95;
the DIB code in Win 95 is designed to simplify the creation of display drivers
for new video cards by doing most of the grunt work in the operating system
instead of in the driver. DIB never really took off.

DLG - Digital Line Graph, a vector format for storing geographical data.

EPS - Encapsulated Postscript is a flavour of Postscript (see below) which

can be included in other documents - if your software supports it.

FPX - The FlashPix format, codeveloped by Hewlett-Packard, Kodak,

Microsoft and LivePicture Corporation and now an open format administered
by the Digital Imaging Group. Kodak uses it in all of their digital cameras from
the DC200 onwards. Flashpix's chief claim to fame is that it stores images in
multiple resolutions, so a huge, high resolution image can be quickly
displayed in miniature on-screen and changes made rapidly to the displayed
data only, saving the CPU-grinding full processing for whenever you actually
view or output the high resolution version. Of course, this only works if your
image editing program supports it, and is not useful for small images. FlashPix
images can also be used for Web graphics, because the server only has to
send the data being viewed (which seems to the browser like an
ordinary JFIF), but since FlashPix doesn't support progressive display like
JFIF or GIF or PNG, it hasn't achieved much popularity. FlashPix also has no
zero-loss compression option - it either uses no compression at all, and
makes a vast file, or uses medium-loss JPEG-type encoding. This makes it a
clumsy format for professional use, since lossy compression is a no-no for
image editing.

GIF - Graphics Interchange Format (the acronym's officially pronounced "JIF",

by decree of the format's creator) is a very efficient, and still quite popular
picture format. There are two "flavours" of GIF, the old 87 and the newer 89a.
89a adds several extra features like transparency (so background graphics
can "show through" the GIF in places) and animation. GIF animations are a
very - some would say excessively - popular form of Web multimedia,
because they're small and display on all current graphical browsers without
needing a special plug-in or taking up much CPU time.

Unfortunately, GIF pictures can only have 256 colours, or 256 shades of grey.
256 greys is photo quality so GIF is fine for any monochrome image, and 256
colour looks OK for many pictures, but it's no use for professional imaging.

GIF images can also be interlaced, so that you can see a low resolution
version of the picture before downloading very much of it. GIF interlacing has
four passes, which show one out of every eight lines, then another eighth of
the image, then another quarter, then the remaining half. GIF is a data-stream
type format, like JFIF, so you can view partially downloaded images whether
or not they're interlaced - without interlacing, a 25% downloaded picture gives
you the first 25% of the lines, starting at the top.
HRF - Hitachi Raster Format, an obscure, proprietary, one bitplane format
used for storing scanner data.

IFF - This is Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format, and is the image format
used by Amiga and Atari ST personal computers. There are multiple IFF
formats, but by far the most popular are the image and sound file ones. A file
with the .IFF suffix may, therefore, be a sound, not a picture - and it might be
any one of a number of other types of data. IFF images may also,
uncommonly, have the suffix .ILBM, for InterLeaved BitMap, or just .LBM on
DOS-based systems.

IFF pictures are not at all efficient, spacewise, but they're fast to display,
which was important for poor little Amigas with a 0.7 million instruction per
second (MIPS) processor. With current PCs steaming along at hundreds and
hundreds of MIPS, this no longer matters at all.

IFF is peculiar in that it has two odd variants - HAM and HAM8. HAM stands
for Hold And Modify, and is a technique the original Amiga designers came up
with for getting 4096 colours from hardware which, traditionally, can only
display 32 at once. HAM8 is the updated version, which displays 262,144
colours on 256 colour hardware. No non-Amiga computer can display HAM
images exactly as they're meant to be seen, but some conversion programs
can display them as 256 or higher colour images. If your display program isn't
smart enough to do this, it'll assume it's loading an ordinary 32 or 256 colour
image and give you a distinctive multicoloured porridge on screen. There are
some very strange IFF variants which use whole different palettes on every
line; pray you never meet one.

All IFF images can be compressed or uncompressed; just about all are
compressed. The compression, like the whole format, is built for speed, not
efficiency, and so doesn't reduce the size much.

ILBM - See IFF.

IMG - This is the format used by the old GEM Paint program; it only works in
256 shades of grey.
IMG - See "PIC".

IMJ - A proprietary variant of the JFIF format created by Pegasus Image

Corporation.

JBG - Also suffixed JBIG, this is the Joint Bilevel Image Group's data
compression and transmission format. JBG is a way of sending one-bitplane
document images so that a low resolution version arrives first, then extra data
to "fill in" more and more detail. Not an image format as such - a JBG "file" is
just a JBG data stream dumped to disk.

JFIF - The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) File Interchange Format,
commonly called JPEG and with the filename suffix .JPG, can be the most
efficient image storage method of all - at a price. First to the name. Everybody
might call these images JPEG, but that just describes the type of compression
used for the data; it doesn't describe how the compressed data is sorted and
stored. Calling JFIF "JPEG" is like calling a Ford Falcon "internal combustion".

The idea of JPEG is that as it compresses the data it throws some of it away -
technically, this is called "lossy compression". You can configure how lossy
you want your JFIFs to be (well, you can if you're using even a slightly well
written JFIF saver); 100% quality gives you almost exactly the same result as
the original picture but also gives you a gigantic, uncompressible file. 10%
quality takes up much less space but looks dodgy. You have to strike a
balance.

JFIF can store up to 24 bit colour, so it's suitable for professional use, and it
can do interlaced display like GIF (called "progressive" JFIF), which along with
its small file sizes makes it the standard format for Web graphics. Like GIF,
JFIF is a data-stream format - you can view images before you've got all of
the data. Also like GIF, JFIF supports interlacing.

The JFIF format also supports CMYK (process colour - Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow and  blacK in a subtractive colour model, as against the additive Red,
Green and Blue more commonly used) images, which makes it suitable for
use in publishing applications. CMYK this support was added in a later version
of the standard, though. This means that quite a few JFIF display applications,
including Web browsers, do peculiar things when fed CMYK images. There's
no reason to use CMYK JFIFs unless you're sending the image to a CMYK
output device, which a monitor definitely isn't. Usually, CMYK ones get
through because someone's converted a CMYK image of some other format,
like TIFF, without changing the colour model.

JFIF quality comparison

Highly compressed
Reasonably high quality
2 kilobyte version
9 kilobyte version
JPG - See JFIF and SPF.

LBM - See IFF.

MacPaint (3k) - Usually suffixed .MAC, this is the format used by the ancient
original black and white Macintosh paint program. Two colours only, 576x720
resolution only, thankfully rare.

MNG - The proposed Multiple Network Graphics (pronounced "ming") format

is a multi-image extension of the existing PNG format - or it will be, if it ever
makes it out of the design stage.

MSP - Microsoft Paint was the early PC answer to MacPaint, and its format is
just as boring. Two colours only.

PCC - see PCX.

PCD - Kodak's PhotoCD was going to set the world alight, with happy
snappers having their film scanned and the high-resolution images written to
CD, to access via PC or special PhotoCD players. Amazingly, it turned out
that nobody was very interested in viewing their photos on their TV, and
PhotoCD flopped miserably in the consumer market. It survives as a
somewhat popular professional image storage format; a genuine PhotoCD
has a particular directory structure containing the images, stored in five
resolutions. An ordinary PCD file can be read by any application that can read
the format, but unless it's on a CD with the right structure, a PhotoCD player
won't recognise it.

The PhotoCD storage process is proprietary to Kodak, who no longer sell the
software to make full multi-resolution images.

PCX  - The ZSoft Paint format, occasionally suffixed .PCC, is ancient but still
fairly widely used, simply because everybody understands it. There are three
common versions, 0, 2 and 5; 0 is the original two colour one (small but not
useful), 2 only does 16 colours and is hence also of little interest to owners of
rather old video cards, and 5 does 24 bit. All are large for what they do, but
fast to load on elderly computers. PCX is the IBM equivalent of Amiga IFF.
The size listed is for v5, at full 24 bit; v2 scored 216k and v0 48.1k.

PIC - A few proprietary (one company makes software that supports them,
and nobody else does) image formats use this suffix. They are not
interchangeable. Some programmers need a good slapping. PIC is most likely
to be the 256 colour format of the old PC Paint program, but it might also be a
Micrografx Draw! vector file, a Lotus vector file, a Pegasus Imaging
Corporation image file or an image file for General Parametrics' Video Show
Film Recorder.

PICT - Pict is the all-in-one Apple Quickdraw metaformat. It can

include bitmapped or vector images, and can use different compression
schemes.

PNG - The Portable Network Graphics format, pronounced "ping", was

created as a free replacement for GIF, whose LZW compression is owned by
Unisys and which can't be included in commercial software without paying
license fees to the owners. It handles 1 to 48 bit images, and is a lossless,
well-compressed format like GIF. It still isn't very popular, though.
PS - Adobe Systems' Postscript isn't an image format, per se - it's a page
description language, originally conceived so computers could send very
accurate page descriptions to the then-new high resolution laser printers. You
can save black and white or even colour pictures as Postscript, but you'll end
up with a very large file. Postscript is not a very efficient format, but its
advantage is it's all plain text - you can modify a Postscript file with any text
editor, if you know what you're doing.

PSD - Adobe Photoshop's native format, which stores all of its layer and
selection and miscellaneous other image data.

RAS - This is SUN Raster format, the default image format for monster SUN
workstations. Only lighhtly compressed and so a rather large format, but it
supports up to 36 bit images.

RAW - This may be a Photoshop RAW file, which is a PSD file with no

identifying header. Or it may be a minimally formatted image data dump -
see PIC.

RGB - See "PIC".

RIX - The orphaned bitmap format of the old DOS ColoRIX paint program.

RLE - This is an antique CompuServe or Windows Run Length Encoded

compressed image format, which only support 256 x 192 black and white
images.

RTF - Microsoft's Rich Text Format, which is normally used as a well-

understood cross-platform word processing document format, but which can
store pictures as well as text. As image storage formats go, though, this one's
as bloated as Postscript.

SPF - SPIFF, Still Picture Interchange File Format, the "official" International
Standards Organisation Joint Photographic Experts Group (ISO JPEG) image
format defined in the recent Part 3 extensions to the JPEG standard. SPIFF
offers more features than the current JPEG standard and is backwards
compatible (a JFIF decoder can understand most SPIFF images), but has not
yet achieved much popularity. SPIFF files may also be suffixed .JPG.

TGA - The real name for this format is just plain "TGA" or "Truevision File
Format", but a lot of people call it "Targa", after the Truevision video card that
first used it. There's a lot of this name confusion in image file formats. It
supports 1 to 32 bit images and professional features like an alpha (mask)
channel, gamma settings and a built-in thumbnail image.

TIF - TIFF (to give the full acronym) stands for Tag Image File Format; many
people say Tagged for the first word, which is technically incorrect but
minimally important. TIFF was a large, unwieldy,  24 bit format until version 6
came out, which supported compression and made it less painful. Mind you,
the fact that its compression was somewhat broken and might or might not be
compatible with different programs on different computers somewhat reduced
the bonus, and the further fact that the compression is LZW and thus owned
and licensed out by Unisys (see GIF) is another pain. TIFF is, nonetheless, a
very popular professional graphics format.

WMF - This is Windows Metafile format, which is an

intermediate vector format for Windows programs to use when interchanging
data and, generally speaking, should never be seen anywhere else.

WPG - This is the WordPerfect metafile format, used by WordPerfect software

on various platforms. It supports bitmapped, vector and Encapsulated
Postscript data.