Image or Graphic File Formats part-1

 Image or Graphic File Formats

There are many standards for image or graphic files. But they are all incompatible. Most of the multimedia programs can, however, load or save a wide variety of graphic formats. In this section, we will introduce you to some of the more popular image formats.

You can check the graphic format of an image by looking at the suffix (extension) of the file name.

TIFF

TIFF (Tag Image File Format) is widely used for transferring bitmap images between application programs. TIFF images have .tiff or .tif extension. It is used in desktop publishing, faxing, 3D applications and medical imaging applications. It is a file format designed by the Microsoft Corporation of USA.

BMP

BMP (BitMap) format defines a display space and the colour for each pixel in the display space. A bitmap does not require information for each pixel on every row. It only needs to contain information when a colour changes along a row. Thus, an image with solid colour will require a small bit map.

Because a bitmap uses a fixed (or raster graphics) method of specifying an image, the image cannot be rescaled without creating a new definition.