FOR
A FULL EXPLANATION OF FILE FORMATS CLICK HERE
There are
a number of common file formats used across different computer
platforms. Applications such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro have
their own generic file formats which enable you to save documents
with layers (meaning that you can go back and edit later).
Once you have
completed working on your image you need to 'flatten' the file
in order to save it as a JPEG or TIFF (or alternatively EXPORT
it from Photoshop). In Photoshop 5 and 6 go to LAYER>FLATTEN
IMAGE. In Paint Shop Pro go to LAYERS>MERGE>MERGE ALL (FLATTEN).
Some file
formats are ideal for printing and others are optimised for the
web. As a rule of thumb TIFF or EPS files are suited to print
based projects and JPEG and GIF files are suited to web based
projects. JPEG provides excellent file compression whilst preserving
the continuous tones that are required for photographs. It is
often referred to as a 'lossy' format because there is a trade
off between image quality and file size. JPEG is particularly
useful for transporting very large files on floppy or zip disks
where you are sending a file to a bureau or printer for output.
A list of
dos suffixes follows in order to enable you recognise different
file extensions:
|
UNFLATTENED
FILE FORMATS
|
COMMON
PRINT FILE FORMATS
|
COMMON
WEB FILE FORMATS
|
|
.psd
= Photoshop
|
.eps
= EPS
|
.jpg
= JPEG
|
|
.psp
= Paint Shop Pro
|
.tif
= TIFF
|
.gif
= GIF
|
| |
|
|
