What is the difference between these formats?

Question

Bitmap, RAW, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, & PDF.
I know that they all can be used t osave and display pictures.
So why is it that DIGITAL Cameras
usually use RW, JPEG or TIFF(?)?
Also are there other formats to save pictures in?
Thanks for any help that you folks can provide.

Answer 1

Hey The Polish Dude,

The development of pictures on the computer over time has led to the different formats. A Bitmap was the first, because each pixel is represented. At first there was only Black and White, and that was mapped to a matrix of pixels, called a bitmap. As time went by, Apple really pushed this, but editor programs were developed for pictures, and Colors were added. The Fax machine was using it's own format, and that is where I first saw Tif files. GIF came as a stand alone picture on the internet, see the Compuserve site for Graphic Image File format. And PDF was the ADOBE document that you can put a picture into. PDF is not really an image format.

Raw is the native format of a particular camera, see the web site below, and they have many different formats.

JPG, is by far the most flexible format, can be used by most programs, and is the most portable, scalable, and therefor usable.

The last site is an Image Tutorial, with pretty good summary.

Answer 2

RAW and TIFF are compressed formats and they are opted to enlarge bis size pictures. RAW pic has to be worked out in computor wheras TIFF format does enlarged straigt away.Both these formats are used by professionals for large size blowups.
Whereas JPEG is commonly used by all for making prints are for viewing.. This format does not occupy more space and so the number of pic in this format will be 10-20 times
compared to RAW &TIFF. There is also another format VEGA which very smal an can be used to send email straight away. The pixel will be much less and so it can not used for enlaring pic more than maxi size.

Answer 3

Your best bet is to shoot in RAW mode if you have the software to look at them. This way you can fix all of your exposure problems and color balance and do all kinds of fun stuff. Then you want to save them as jpegs. You can them open them in photoshop or another editing software and manipulate them even more. Those are really the only two formats you need to worry about. If you are worried about space on a flash card and dont wanna shoot raw, you can shoot jpeg. This way they can still be manipulated in photoshop but you wont be able to do your exposure compensations and color balancing.
Tiff you can forget about, if you are emailing or anything most people cant open these anyway, may as well work on a jpeg.
PDF files are okay, most people can open these if you were to email them, but not normally picture files, These are more often brochures or menus, things like that.
Good Luck!

Answer 4

Most cameras use JPG. It's a versatile format. Others compress the image differently. This way you get the image without taking up lots of memory. GIFs usually have fewer colors & smaller size. They get grainy when resized, JPGs are middle-of-the road. Good for printing. TIFs and others hve even more colors and take up more space. They're better for graphics projects.

Answer 5

There are lossless (every pixel in the original is there) and lossy (it compresses and loses some detail) formats.

Skip GIF. It's lossless but only can handle 256 colours.

JPG is lossy, good compression without too much detail loss but if you change/save/change/save you'll lose too much detail.

Bitmap, RAW and TIF are lossless and BIG, but if you want to edit pictures, use one (TIF is more popular).

PDF is a document format, stay away.