Image Formats and Where to Use Them!
Let’s go back to basics. The image file formats that are most commonly used are listed below.
File Format | File Extension | Use |
Joint Photographic Experts Group | .jpg/.jpeg | Perfect for real-life photographs, paintings, and scenes with smooth variations of colors and effects. |
Portable Network Graphics | .png | Widely used lossless image compression format. Perfect for preserving original images with complete visual details. |
Graphics Interchange Format | .gif | Suitable for sharp-edged line art with a limited number of colors, small animations, and low-resolution movie clips. |
Tagged Image File Format | .tiff | Standard in printing, desktop publishing, faxing, 3D applications, and medical imaging. |
Portable Document Format | Adequate for web downloads, image sharing, and printing in some cases. | |
Adobe Illustrator Artwork | .ai | Represents single-page vector-based drawings in either EPS or PDF formats. The extension is designed for Adobe Illustrator. |
Photoshop Document | .psd | Provides support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. It keeps layers intact with a file size limit of 2GB. |
Photoshop Large Document or Photoshop Big | .psb | A file format almost identical to .PSD, but unlike .PSD, it supports documents larger than 2GB and can range up to 4.2 billion GB. |