Graphical File Formats

[Jayc]

Hello Bulbagarden, I am thinking of using universally among my personal archives, a certain graphical file format, but as with all things technological I am happily prone to screwing up.

So Bulbagarden, I was hoping you could give me a graphical file format that best meets my requirements and some important facts on the format itself. No anecdotal stuff though.

The requirements are in order of importance.

-It must have a consistent and extremely high quality, the higher the better.
-It must have a reasonable size. Around 1Mb or below for a 1k by 1k image would be good, although the smaller the better, obviously.
-It should be supported by almost everything. This, I am willing to forego if the other prerequisites are fulfilled.

That is all. Thanks in advance.

 

[Caspian]

What type of images are you trying to convert?

.jpeg is tried and tested. Supported by basically everything. Doesnt support transparency and may lose some quality depending on how high you set it.

.png is pretty high quality supports transparency but can be rather large. Might not be supported by some older programs but most things are compatible with it nowadays.

If they're photos stick with jpeg and personally I'd do the same for art (photoshop and stuff), unless it has transparency.

 

[Gligar13]

I use PNG for my images. Photos are almost always in jpeg format today, though.

 

[Jayc]

My benchmark would be .bmp which .jpeg and .png unfortunately does not seem to exceed. The images in question are mostly Photoshop art. There are no photos.

However, the .bmp format is rather memory-intensive so I am looking for an alternative format which is on par or exceeds the quality of .bmp files while being less memory-hungry.

Or is there no format which exceeds the quality of .bmp?

 

[Caspian]

.bmp is horrible. There is no reason to have photoshops to be .bmp at all.

.png is lossless and has better compression then .bmp. There isnt a difference, except for the fact that .png has better compression and is able to support alpha channels/transparency.

Remember, bigger memory size != better quality.

 

[Ho-oh]

JPEG and PNG are my preferred formats. PNG is good for computer - generated graphics, while JPEG is good for photographs and hi-res/hi-color images.

 

[Jayc]

@Caspian: Okay, thanks. Though I was wondering about the other formats Photoshop offers.

 

[Dopey]

Stick with PNG.

 

[Zesty Cactus]

Like others have said, stick with PNG. I prefer it for all my own images. It's reasonably small disk-space wise but doesn't look like crap either.

 

[Caspian]

@Caspian: Okay, thanks. Though I was wondering about the other formats Photoshop offers.

I dont really know the others. I think theyre there for the sake of being there if needed. I've used TIFF for 3D rendering in DirectX but thats about it.

 

[Blazaking]

.PNG is a very good option.

 

[Eevee]

Use PNG.

If you absolutely need the space saving, you can kinda get away with very high quality (like, 95%) JPEG. But don't.

Never use BMP or TIFF unless you have an extremely compelling reason and know what it is.

 

[Dawn~Berlitz]

PNG is the way 2 go