Images

One of the things that I'm interested is in images. There are a lot of things to remember and the thing that seems to be forgotten the most, it is making sure that images have the right extension on them. I mean, you have a GIF (image.gif) file, but you in the HTML, you want try to bring up the same file, but with a JPG extension (image.jpg). This of course will cause the browser to give you a nice little idea about image formats.

All this would be solved if there weren't so many different graphic formats. Ofcourse, each format has a different format, so the solution is to pay closer attention, and also to learn what each format is, and why they are used in different situations.

I will briefly describe 4 basic graphic formats.

The first thing that we need to understand is that there are 2 types of image compression, lossy, and lossless. Different image formats use different compression formats.

Lossless compression compresses an image without removing any data. Lossy compression will discard some of the data so that it can be compressed more. Lossy images typically wouldn't have as many colours available.

1>> JPG, JPEG, or Joint Photographic Experts Group Format images have lossy compression. This is a common format used when saving photographs. Doesn't save line art very well.

2>> GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format uses lossless compression. The image quality might not be that high, but there are sharp edges. This is one of the reasons why it is used on web pages for small graphics. It can retain the sharp edges. Another reason is that GIF images can be used on PCs and Macs.

3>> TIF, TIFF, or Tagged Image File Format is also cross-platform between Macs and PCs. There isn't really any compression with this format and the file size can be quite large.

4>> BMP, or Bitmap Format uses a pixel map which contains line by line information. It is a very common format, as it got its start in Windows. This format can cause an image to be super large.

Just remember when you are working with images to pick the best format most appropriate for what you are doing and for the type of picture it is.