Image File Types

• GIF files- "Graphics Interchange Format"
  - Image file that may contain up to 256 indexed colors
  - "Graphics Interchange Format"
  -  Supports animation and transparancy but only 256 colours
• JPEG files - "Joint photographic experts group"
  -  The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality
  - Most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices
  - Commonly used method of lossy compression for digital photography
• Animated GIF files - "Graphics Interchange Format"
  - The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors.
  - It supports animations
  - They are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality.
• MPEG files -  standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio.

 What is a vector based image and how is it different to a bitmap based image? Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics. It is different to a bitmap image as image pixels are generally stored with a color depth.