GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is one of the most popular formats for storing short animations, offering a succession of several images of your choice. You can often see them used in online ad banners or showing short “moving image” sequences on various social networks.
While some people think creating animated GIFs requires sophisticated software specialized in processing videos, the truth is with reaConverter’s free edition you can make your own customized animation in a matter of seconds.
JPEG is the most popular format for storing and sharing decent quality images or uploading them online. But in case you want to process a JPG file via a computer-aided design program such as AutoCAD, you will need to vectorize it. Or, in other words, turn it from a raster file made up of pixels — into a vector file made up of points, lines and curves.
When — mostly programmers, in fact — refer to the Netpbm format they usually imply a group of filename extensions associated with graphic images, including the following:
All these 3 image file formats can also be found under a single name: PNM (Portable Anymap Format). All were created in the 1980s and became very popular at the time among programmers and computer engineers. Their main advantage was their “portability” or ability to be easily exchanged on different platforms. The Netpbm package used to be a leading group of software used by designers and programmers to easily handle and edit images. But this was all before programs such as Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop or Gimp became as widely available as they are today.
Although PCX files used to be more popular a few years ago, when computer display hardware was still in its early days of development, you still might find yourself having to handle such a file today. Have you received a PCX image file by e-mail? Or discovered one on an old hard-drive? In any case, you will find such files are not supported by all image viewers, so handling them can be quite difficult.
For this reason, we recommend converting your PCX files to a more popular format, such as JPEG. Using JPEG makes things a lot less complicated when you plan to send you images by e-mail, post them on-line or store them without taking too much space on your computer. All you need to do is use a powerful converter, which will quickly allow you to transform all your PCX files into JPEGs.
Creating animated PNG files, that include a series of successive images of your choice, no longer requires a program specialized in processing images or videos. Instead, it can be done using free edition of reaConverter software!
Many graphic designers prefer to use the PSD (Photoshop Document) extension when creating and editing images because of its multiple advantages. A proprietary format for Adobe Photoshop, PSD can store files with multiple layers, provides lossless compression and helps users handle a wide variety of advanced drawing options.
However, PSD files tend to get very large in size, which makes them difficult to store and transfer. Plus, they are compatible with very few other programs apart from Adobe Photoshop. For this reason, most designers prefer to convert PSD files to more accessible extensions — such as JPEG or PNG — once they are done with editing them.
While at the moment JPEG and PNG are considered to be the most popular formats for storing and transferring images, Google promises things will look different in the future. In 2010, the company launched WebP, a new image format meant to challenge the leading position of the two formats mentioned above. And ever since then, its developers have added several new features and functions, while more and more people have begun to discuss the usefulness of switching to WebP.
In case you happened to find yourself having a group of TGA files (perhaps someone sent them by e-mail or transferred them to your computer) and are not sure how to handle them, here are some quick tips.
The TGA (Truevision Graphics Adapter) format was created in the 1980s by a company called Truevision as a raster graphics file format and it is also referred to as ‟TARGA (Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter) format”. Though the company doesn’t exist anymore under this name, the file is still widely used for storing deep-pixel images and graphics that contain image data up to 32-bits per pixel. You will often find TGA images associated with 3D video games or have them used for still-video editing.
JPG and PNG are two of the most popular extensions for image files, but which one is the best? Some people prefer the JPG format because of its small size, because it is easy to upload online and it is compatible with any image viewer program you might have and with all photo sharing websites. However, JPG is a lossy compression format, which means it discards some of the encoding information of the image so as to ensure the file is not too large. This translates into poorer quality — including some image noise and possibly irregular shapes, which is relevant particularly if you plan to print the image or use it for graphics editing.
If you are the proud owner of a freshly released NX300, or of another Samsung camera model, you might soon discover that answering the question in the title is not as easy as it seems. When downloading the first series of photos on your computer, you might discover their format is not JPEG, PNG or any another image extension that your regular photo viewer can easily recognize. Instead, you will see a bunch of SRW files that your computer does not know how to open and edit.