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ADI AutoCAD's Device-Independent Binary Plotter Format, a vector format generated by AutoCAD. AI Adobe Illustrator's metafile format, which is actually a type of Encapsulated Postscript.
BMP Microsoft Windows bitmap format, also used in OS/2. It's a fairly compact (compression is optional, but usually turned on) format for images up to 24 bit. BMP is the native bitmap format for the Windows environment.
CAM Casio Camera, the native file format of Casio's QV-series digital cameras. CGM Computer Graphics Metafile, an American National Standards Institute/International Standards Organization metafile format for images of pretty much any kind. CT The most popular of the Scitex image formats, Scitex Continuous Tone images are very large and intended for use with Scitex's professional film-printing units, which produce high-grade output for publication.
DCS1, DCS2 Desktop Color Separation. Developed by Quark. A DCS1 file is composed of five files. The main file is a composite with a low-resolution preview and pointers to the separation files. There are four separations files, one for each process color. DCS2 adds spot color capabilities, and single file as well multi-file formats. DLG Digital Line Graph, a vector format for storing geographical data.
EPS Encapsulated PostScript is a type of Postscript which can be imported into page layout and vector graphics programs.
FPX The FlashPix format, co-developed by Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Microsoft and LivePicture Corporation and now an open format administered by the Digital Imaging Group. Kodak uses it in all of their digital cameras from the DC200 onwards. Flashpix's main claim to fame is that it stores images in multiple resolutions, so a huge, high resolution image can be quickly displayed in miniature on-screen and changes made rapidly to the displayed data only, saving the CPU-grinding full processing for whenever you actually view or output the high resolution version. Of course, this only works if your image editing program supports it, and is not useful for small images. FlashPix images can also be used for Web graphics because the server only has to send the data being viewed, but since FlashPix doesn't support progressive display like GIF or PNG, it hasn't achieved much popularity. FlashPix also has no zero-loss compression option - it either uses no compression at all, and makes a vast file, or uses medium-loss JPEG-type encoding. This makes it a clumsy format for professional use, since lossy compression is a no-no for image editing.
GIF pronounced "JIF", by the format's creator, but many prefer GIF as in gift Graphics Interchange Format is a very efficient, and popular picture format. There are two versions of GIF, the old 87 and the newer 89a. 89a adds several extra features like transparency (so background graphics can "show through" selected colors) and animation. GIF animations are a very popular form of Web multimedia, because they're small and display on all current graphical browsers without needing a special plug-in or taking up much CPU time.
IFF Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format, and is the image format used by Amiga and Atari ST personal computers. There are multiple IFF formats, the most popular are the image and sound files. A file with the .IFF suffix may, therefore, be a sound, not a picture - and it might be any one of a number of other types of data. IFF images may rarely have the suffix .ILBM, for InterLeaved BitMap, or just .LBM on DOS-based systems.
JBG Also suffixed JBIG,this is the Joint Bilevel Image Group's data compression and transmission format. JBG is a way of sending one-bitplane document images so that a low resolution version arrives first, then extra data to "fill in" more and more detail. Not an image format as such a JBG "file" is just a JBG data stream dumped to disk. JPEG, JPG Joint Photographic Experts Group. File Interchange Format, commonly called JPEG and with the filename extension .JPG, can be the most efficient image storage method of all - at a price. First to the name. Everybody might call these images JPEG, but that just describes the type of compression used for the data; it doesn't describe how the compressed data is sorted and stored.
LBM See IFF.
MNG pronounced "ming") The proposed Multiple Network Graphics format is a multi-image extension of the existing PNG format.
PCD Kodak's PhotoCD was going to set the world alight, with happy snappers having their film scanned and the high-resolution images written to CD, to access via PC or special PhotoCD players. Amazingly, it turned out that nobody was very interested in viewing their photos on their TV, and PhotoCD flopped miserably in the consumer market. It survives as a somewhat popular professional image storage format; a genuine PhotoCD has a particular directory structure containing the images, stored in five resolutions. An ordinary PCD file can be read by any application that can read the format, but unless it's on a CD with the right structure, a PhotoCD player won't recognize it. PCX ZSoft Paint format, occasionally suffixed .PCC, is ancient but still fairly widely used, simply because everybody understands it. There are three common versions, 0, 2 and 5; 0 is the original two color one (small but not useful), 2 only does 16 colors and is hence also of little interest to owners of rather old video cards, and 5 does 24 bit. All are large for what they do, but fast to load on elderly computers. PCX is the IBM equivalent of Amiga IFF. The size listed is for v5, at full 24 bit; v2 scored 216k and v0 48.1k. PICT Pict is the Apple Quickdraw metaformat. It can include bitmapped or vector images, and can use different compression schemes. Avoid using PICT as a file format if you need to color-separate your output or if the image contains PostScript text or graphics. With PICT, what you see onscreen is not always what you get on paper. The more recent PICT2 format supports 24-bit color. PNG pronounced "ping" Portable Network Graphics format, was created as a free replacement for GIF, whose LZW compression is owned by Unisys and which can't be included in commercial software without paying license fees to the owners. It handles 1 to 48 bit images, and is a lossless, well-compressed format like GIF. PS Adobe Systems Postscript isn't an image format, per se - it's a page description language, originally conceived so computers could send very accurate page descriptions to the then new high resolution laser printers. You can save black and white or even color pictures as Postscript, but you'll end up with a very large file. Postscript is not a very efficient format, but its advantage is all plain text - you can modify a Postscript file with any text editor, if you know what you're doing. PSD Adobe Photoshop's native format, which stores all of its layer and selection and miscellaneous other image data.
RAS SUN Raster format. The default image format for SUN workstations. Only lightly compressed and so a rather large format, but it supports up to 36 bit images. RAW This may be a Photoshop RAW file, which is a PSD file with no identifying header. Or it may be a minimally formatted image data dump. RLE Antique CompuServe or Windows Run Length Encoded compressed image format, which only support 256 x 192 black and white images. RTF Microsoft's Rich Text Format, which is normally used as a well-understood cross-platform word processing document format, but which can store pictures as well as text. As image storage formats go, though, this one is as inefficient as Postscript.
SPF SPIFF, Still Picture Interchange File Format, the "official" International Standards organization Joint Photographic Experts Group (ISO JPEG) image format defined in the recent Part 3 extensions to the JPEG standard. SPIFF offers more features than the current JPEG standard and is backwards compatible, but has not yet achieved much popularity. SPIFF files may also be suffixed .JPG.
TGA The real name for this format is just plain "TGA" or "Truevision File Format", but a lot of people call it "Targa", after the Truevision video card that first used it. There's a lot of this name confusion in image file formats. It supports 1 to 32 bit images and professional features like an alpha (mask) channel, gamma settings and a built-in thumbnail image. TIFF, TIF TIFF stands for Tag Image File Format; TIFF was a large, unwieldy, 24 bit format until version 6 came out, which supported compression and made it less painful. The fact that its compression was somewhat broken and might or might not be compatible with different programs on different computers somewhat reduced the bonus. The compression is LZW and thus owned and licensed out by Unisys (see GIF) is another problem. TIFF is, nonetheless, a very popular professional graphics format. A TIFF file permits the image to be edited in other applications (ie QuarkXpress, and Macromedia Freehand)
WMF Windows Metafile format, which is an intermediate vector format for Windows programs to use when interchanging data and, generally speaking, should never be seen anywhere else. WPG WordPerfect metafile format, used by WordPerfect software on various platforms. It supports bitmapped, vector and Encapsulated Postscript data.
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JPEG 2000, a new Image format standard promises:
