Image formats

There are many image formats in use today. Three which are common in networked applications are:

gif: Graphic Interchange Format, used for logos, cartoons, and other flat art with up to 256 different colors
jpeg: Joint Photographers Expert Group, a compressible format used for photographic images
bmp: Microsoft Bitmap, an uncompressed format used for photographic images

Input devices like scanners and digital cameras typically encode images in one of these formats. Virtually all image processing programs can work with images in these three formats, and most can handle several others. Your image processing program will also be able to convert an image from one format to another, for example, taking a .bmp image from a scanner and saving it as a compressed .jpg image.

For more on image file formats, see this Computerworld article.

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