Image File Types

There are many different file types when it comes to saving images, each of these suitable for different images, there are 6 main file types that I will cover, PNG, PSD, TIF,BMP,JPEG, and vector. PNG, PSD, and TIF are all fairly similar in the way that they are all very high quality file types, because of this however they are also very large files, they are often used for programs such as Photoshop, especially PSD files as they are specifically designed by adobe for Photoshop. BMP files are also fairly similar however they don’t use any compression at all and because of this are even larger in size meaning that often they aren’t used in programs such as Photoshop. Below is an example of a high quality PNG image.

JPEG images are considered the most common file type for images they are usually fairly small in size due to using a lossy compression technique which reduces the file size every time it is saved however this also reduces image quality and so is not used in Photoshop, because images are saved regularly which means too much image quality is lost. Finally there are Vector images these are very small files used only in programs like Adobe illustrator, they are small because vector files don’t store pixel information, only co-ordinates or ‘instructions’ on how to recreate the image. Below shows an example of lossy compression within a JPEG image, you can see the image loose quality on the right side to show an example of a JPEG saved multiple times.