Frame Photo Editor

Photo Editing Tool to Decorate Photos Easily

Photo File Formats

JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, BMP. What are they, and how do you choose? These and many other file types are used to encode digital images. The choices are simpler than you might think.

Part of the reason of file types is the need for compression. Image files can be quite large, and larger file types mean more disk usage and slower downloads. Compression is a term used to describe ways of cutting the size of the file. Compression schemes can be lossy or lossless.

Another reason for the many file types is that images differ in the number of colors they contain. If an image has few colors, a file type can be designed to exploit this as a way of reducing file size.

Lossy vs. Lossless compression

A lossless compression algorithm discards no information. It looks for more efficient ways to represent an image, while making no compromises in accuracy. In contrast, lossy algorithms accept some degradation in the image in order to achieve smaller file size.

Number of colors

The simplest images may contain only two colors, such as black and white, and will need only 1 bit to represent each pixel. Many early PC video cards would support only 16 fixed colors. Later cards would display 256 simultaneously, any of which could be chosen from a pool of 224, or 16 million colors. New cards devote 24 bits to each pixel, and are therefore capable of displaying 224, or 16 million colors without restriction. A few display even more. Since the eye has trouble distinguishing between similar colors, 24 bit or 16 million colors is often called TrueColor.

Image File types

TIFF is, in principle, a very flexible format that can be lossless or lossy. The details of the image storage algorithm are included as part of the file. In practice, TIFF is used almost exclusively as a lossless image storage format that uses no compression at all.So, file sizes are quite big.

PNG is also a lossless storage format. However, in contrast with common TIFF usage, it looks for patterns in the image that it can use to compress file size. The compression is exactly reversible, so the image is recovered exactly.

GIF creates a table of up to 256 colors from a pool of 16 million. If the image has fewer than 256 colors, GIF can render the image exactly. When the image contains many colors, software that creates the GIF uses any of several algorithms to approximate the colors in the image with the limited palette of 256 colors available. Thus, GIF is "lossless" only for images with 256 colors or less.

JPG is optimized for photographs and similar continuous tone images that contain many, many colors. It can achieve astounding compression ratios even while maintaining very high image quality. GIF compression is unkind to such images. JPG works by analyzing images and discarding kinds of information that the eye is least likely to notice. It stores information as 24 bit color. Important: the degree of compression of JPG is adjustable.

RAW is an image output option available on some digital cameras. Though lossless, it is a factor of three of four smaller than TIFF files of the same image. The disadvantage is that there is a different RAW format for each manufacturer.

BMP is an uncompressed proprietary format invented by Microsoft. There is really no reason to ever use this format.

PSD, PSP, etc. , are proprietary formats used by graphics programs. Photoshop's files have the PSD extension, while Paint Shop Pro files use PSP. However, be sure to save your end result as a standard TIFF or JPG, or you may not be able to view it in a few years when your software has changed.

File size comparisons

Below are comparisons of the same image saved in several popular file types.

File type	Size
Tiff, uncompressed	901K
Tiff, LZW lossless compression (yes, its actually bigger)	928K
JPG, High quality	319K
JPG, medium quality	188K
JPG, usual web quality	105K
JPG, low quality / high compression	50K
JPG, absurdly high compression	18K
PNG, lossless compression	741K
GIF, lossless compression, but only 256 colors	131K