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Graphic Formats: What's the Difference?

© Anna Morvee

The best program I've found is Paint Shop Pro for resizing, personalizing or creating your own graphics. Jasc has a demo download available. I recommend that you try before you buy, but I'm sure that after you learn to get around in the program that you will be purchasing this program that packs a punch and many has many options available.

There is a wealth of information available for Paint Shop Pro on the Internet. Allowing beginners to advanced users to find suitable tutorials and information for the use of PSP.

Sizing your graphics and a brief overview of different file formats.

One very important thing to remember is you can't resize a graphic larger than it was made with good results. You can always go smaller keeping the graphic closer to its original state. If you find that after you've resize your graphic that it is blurry you can always use the sharpen filter and it usually brings the graphic into focus.

When you take a graphic and make it larger the pixels that make up the graphic get bigger. This results in the "jagies" or little squares which are called pixels. You also loose quality and on some graphics (templates) the distortion is so bad that the original graphic is lost in a sea of pixels or becomes so distorted that the graphic quality isn't something you would want to print or share.

JPG's, JPEG's, BMP's, Tiff's and GIF's are raster format graphics. Meaning they are made of tiny squares. To keep the quality the BMP and TIFF formats are the best, however they are large in file size and not the best choice for posting to the web or email lists. JPEG/JPG's are the most common format. Although they aren't the best quality it is the file of choice to post to an email list or onto the web. JPEG's are best used for photos or for pictures that you want to have 16 million colors.

GIF's are usually only good for web viewing and animation. GIF's have 256 colors or less and can have the transparent backgrounds. (Which really aren't transparent, but that's another story.)

Paint Shop Pro 7 has a JPEG and GIF optimizer which allows you to save the graphic at the best quality without to much distortion and a smaller file size. Remember though you can't successfully size up a raster graphic and keep acceptable quality.

Vector graphics are WMF's or the Windows Meta File format. WMF's are graphics that are created using a complicated math formula to allow the lines and curves to be resized smaller or larger without any distortion. In order to save a WMF you need a drawing program that supports WMF's and can successfully save as a WMF.