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BITMAP VS VECTOR
Bitmap Formats
While there are many bitmap formats, there are currently three major web or mobile friendly formats:
- *.JPG / *.JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group) – used mainly for digital pictures (e.g., cameras, smart phones, videocam, etc) or scanned images – It supports 24 bit or 16.7 million colors, but does NOT support transparency.
NOTE: Just because the JPG format SUPPORTS over 16 millions colors, does not meant that it DISPLAYS all of those colors in one image. These are the colors that it can pick from to have in an image. Moreover, because the JPG supports over 16 million colors, it DOES NOT have a Color Lookkup Table (CLUT) like its counterpart GIF as you will soon discover.
- *.GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) – used mainly for image with a lot of solid colors and lines (e.g., clipart, lineart). It supports 8 bit or 256 or less colors and it supports INDEX transparency which means that you can "knock out" one index color to be transparent. It also supports animation (e.g., animated gif).
NOTE: Because the GIF format supports only 256 or less colors, it DOES have a Color Lookup Table so that you can see the available INDEX colors in the image.
- *.PNG (Portable Network Graphics) – used mainly for images especially with transparency. It has the best of both worlds (16.7 millions colors like jpgs and transparency like gifs). However, it supports ALPHA transparency which means that it can produce different level of transparency (e.g., semi-transparent). Colors are displayed more accurately than JPG but may result is a larger file size. As a result, it is best to used when multiple levels of transparency is needed for an image. PNG files was designed for transferring images over the internet and as such does not support non-RGB color space (e.g., CMYK for print).
NOTE: Because the PNG format can support over 16 million colors like its JPG counterpart, it too does not have a Color Lookkup Table (CLUT).
PNG files comes in two main flavors:- PNG-8 which is similar to a GIF file in that it is limited to 256 colors or 8 bits, including a single transparent color
- PNG-24 which is similar to JPG (16.7 colors) but has 8 bits or 256 grayscale colors for transparency for each pixel.
Other bitmap formats:
- *.tiff, *.bmp, *.pict, etc. - other bitmap formats that are not used on the web.
- *.eps (encapsulated postscript) – can contain both bitmap and vector data and is being replaced by the PDF (Portable Document Format) format.
Programs that support bitmaps:
Below is a few programs that are used PRIMARILY to create or edit bitmap images. However, you can still create or edit vectors inside of them as well: