[thelist] Image Formats Description

j.d. welch so.there at showtunepink.com
Sun Feb 9 12:34:01 CST 2003


On Sunday, February 9, 2003, at 12:16 PM, Kevin Cannon wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Does anyone know where I can find some decent descriptions fo the main
> image
> formats for a lay person.
>
> Basically where it says stuff like, gif is generally used for images
> like
> cartoons or graphs, images with large areas of flat colour etc...?

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/ is a good, no-bullshit summary of PNG, JPG,
GIF and SVG -- the only formats i've ever used for web graphics*.
http://www.buildwebsite4u.com/building/web-graphics-formats.shtml is a
very simple 'use this here' sort of guide, but i disagree somewhat with
its recommendations.

personally, i avoid GIFs as much as possible, as 8-bit PNGs give far
superior results with transparency and indexed color, for things like
bitmap representations of vector graphics and, like you said, "images
with large areas of flat colour etc."  sadly, ie5.5/windows doesn't
like PNG transparency (http://www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/),
which imo would be the _only_ reason to use a GIF.

i usually use JPGs for bitmap graphics (photographs) as it compresses
well. i would use PNGs instead of JPGs more often, but my image editor
of choice (photoshop) does a lousy job of compressing truecolor
(24-bit) PNGs, however, the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program -
http://gimp.org/) does PNGs quite well, and is free, to boot.

on my list of stuff to play with is SVG, but since it's not an included
part of any browser yet (right?) it's not readily practical (yet!).

sorry that was a bit of a rant, but i hope it helps...

-jd

*=output files, and flash doesn't count.
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    J.D. Welch			|    so.there at showtunepink.com
    graphic designer    	|    http://www.showtunepink.com
    web developer       	|    http://kitschparade.ath.cx
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