File Types

Scenario

A film poster is a major part of the promotional tools for the movie industry; it sent the tone for the movie and gives the audience an idea of the genre/style or subject of the film. I’m aiming to learn the different techniques that allow us to plan design and produce a poster for a film. I’m going to create the idea for a film; I’ll take or find suitable photographs to create it.

Understanding graphic file formats and applications

Raster

Those images are made up from individual colored square pixels that, when get combined will create some form of an image. Program such as SketchUp uses and supports many different raster image formats, every single one of them has its own particular advantages and disadvantages and should be chosen depending on the task you want to perform.

Vector

It is the geometrical primitives such as: lines, points, shapes, polygons or curves. All of these are based on mathematical expression and its used to represent images in the computer graphics. Vector, in this case is not just a straight lines. Vector graphics is based on images that are made up from paths or strokes other known as Vectors. It leads through locations called control points. Each of those points has a definite position on the x and y-axes as well as variety of database, including the locations of the points in the workspace and the direction of the vector.

Every created track can be assigned with a shape, color, thickness or even a fill. This process does not drastically affect the size of the file as all of the information resides in the structure.

There are opinions, which say that working with vector tools and formats is the best practice.

File Extensions

File extensions also called, as filename extensions are the suffixes at the end of the name, it shows what type and kind of file it is.  Example would be “Michal.jpg” as you can see from the ending it is a JPEG image format, which is based on the “jpg”.

Files such as “Michal.txt” are text documents and “Michal.docx” is a Microsoft Word document.

It is very helpful to know the common file types; most file extensions consist of three letters but there are fewer (e.g. H, DB, PS) where other could have more (e.g. GADGET, TORRENT, TAX2012. When opened on the computer it will determine what program should be used to open such document but if you change the particular file’s extension it may also change the program that your computer uses to open the file. You have to be careful when changing file’s extensions, as computer may not be able to open the file.

There are tens of thousands of software programs and filename extensions available, it is impossible to remember them all but the ones commonly used will stay in your head.

Tiff

Tiff other called as Tagged Image File Format is often used to exchange files between applications and different computer platforms such as Mac or PC. There are many different variations to the TIFF format available, although TIFF might not be as universally accessible as any other formats such as JPEG or PNG. Software called SketchUp supports wide range of TIFF format. Before exporting file into TIFF you should first test the compatibility with other applications.

It also stores raw bitmap data by some programs and devices such as scanners. It comes in compressed and uncompressed variant however uncompressed variant is not advised.

It was made primarily for RASTER data interchange and its main strengths are a highly flexible and platform-independent format that is supported by few different image-processing applications.

When opening file extensions such as PNG or JPEG via browser you can come across a situation where Tiff may require additional software to be viewed on some systems where PNG and JPEG doesn’t.

 

PSD/PSB

Adobe Photoshop files has a default file extension as .PSD and it also stands for Photoshop Document.  The file stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop.  Those include layers with masks, ICC profiles, color spaces CMYK Mode, transparency text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths and duotone settings.

Sometimes Photoshop has .PSB file extensions, which stands for ‘Photoshop Big’ it is a large document format. A PSB file extends the PSD file format, increasing the height and width to 300, 000 pixels.

JPEG

JPEG is a standardized image compression mechanism, jpeg stands for ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’ and it is an original name. The compression is ‘lossy’, meaning that the decompressed image isn’t quite the same that you’ve started with. The JPEG file format is made to exploit known limitations of the human eye, notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than small changes in brightness.

JPEG is intended for compressing images that will be looked at by us, humans so if you are planning to machine-analyze your photos, the small errors introduced by JPEG may be a problem for you, even if they are invisible to the eye.

For full color images, the uncompressed data is always 24 bits/pixel. The best-known ‘lossless’ compression methods can compress such data about 2:1 on average. JPEG files can normally achieve 10:1 to 20:1 compression without visible loss, bringing the effective storage requirements down to 1 to 2 bits/pixel. However 30:1 to 50:1 compression is possible with small to moderate defects, while for very low quality purposes such as previews r archive indexes, 100:1 compression is quite feasible. Image compressed 100:1 with JPEG takes up the same space as full color one tenth scale thumbnail image.

JPEG compression is poor on:

• LARGE AREAS OF PIXELS THAT ARE ALL EXACTLY THE SAME COLOR
• ICONS THAT USE ONLY FEW COLORS
• VERY SHARP EDGES, SHARP EDGES TEND TO COME OUT BLURRED UNLESS YOU USE A VERY HIGH QUALITY SETTING
• SMALL TEXT THAT’S ONLY A FEW PIXELS HIGH
• PLAIN BLACK AND WHITE IMAGES (TWO LEVEL)

GIF

Gif other known as ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ it was introduced in the 1980s on CompuServe to allow high quality and resolution graphics to be displayed on different types of graphics hardware’s and was intended as an exchange and display mechanism for graphics images.

Saving a photographic image as ‘GIF’ firstly gives us a reduction in color depth from 16 million colors to 256.

Gif is potentially very useful on areas where the JPEG compression is rather poor and where we are looking for a file size that is significantly less than PNG that is for images having:

• LARGE AREAS OF PIXELS THAT ARE ALL EXACTLY THE SAME COLOR
• ICONS THAT USE ONLY A FEW COLORS
• VERY SHARP EDGES: A ROW OF PURE-BLACK PIXELS ADJACENT TO A ROW OF PURE-WHITE PIXELS, FOR EXAMPLE
• SMALL TEXT THAT’S ONLY A FEW PIXELS HIGH
• PLAIN BLACK-AND-WHITE (TWO LEVEL) IMAGES

PNG

PNG, the Portable Network Graphics file format is made and developed for transferring variety of images efficiently all over the world wide web without any data loss. Like JPEG or PNG it also uses compression, however it is a non-lossy variety that is free from artifacts.

It is considered to use PNG for models that have large areas of solid, uniform, colors (such as non textured SketchUp models)