An Introduction to Picture and Some Popular Picture Formats

An Overview of Picture

A picture is an image taken from photography starting in 1826. It is usually produced by collecting photons from photosensitive paper. The principle of photo phase formation is to generate a still image on the radiation sensitive material such as photosensitive negative film, paper, glass or metal through the chemical action of light. In MiniTool, you can acquire more information about the picture.

Most pictures are taken by cameras (point-and-shoot cameras, digital cameras, micro-cameras, SLR cameras, Polaroid, etc.). Pictures have positive and negative two types.

In 1841, the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot published a Carlo-style camera, which produced a negative film that could be copied many times, which laid the foundation for the photographic process of modern photography.

Today, picture download becomes very convenient. You just need type words like nice picture in the search window, and then a lot of pictures pop up in the page.

Picture Format

Pictures have many kinds of formats. Some of them are mainly used in daily, but some may not be frequently used. This part will emphasize some mainstream picture formats. If you are interested in picture formats, you can focus on this part.

BMP: BMP (Bitmap), a standard image file format in Windows operating system, supported by various Windows applications. With the popularity of the Windows operating system and the development of many Windows applications, the BMP bitmap format is naturally widely used.

This picture format is characterized by rich image information and nearly no compression, but this leads to its inherent disadvantages – taking too much disk space. So, BMP is popular on a single machine.

GIF: GIF is short for Graphics Interchange Format. In literal meaning, this format is used to exchange pictures. The GIF format features with high compression ratio and less disk space, so this image format has been widely used.

In addition, considering the actual situation in network transmission, the GIF image format adds a fade-in mode. That means you can view the outline of the picture during the image transmission process and then gradually see the details as the transmission process continues. And this satisfies users’ from swearing to clear viewing psychology.

However, GIF has a small drawback – it cannot store images of more than 256 colors. Despite this, this format is still popular on the Internet, which is inseparable from the advantages of short GIF image files, fast download speeds, and the ability to compose animations with many image files of the same size.

JPEG: It is also a common image developed by the joint Photographic Experts Group and named “ISO10918-1”. JPEG is just a common name. The extension name of JPEG files is .jpg or .jpeg.

Its compression technology is very advanced. It uses lossy compression to remove redundant images and color data, and it can obtain very rich and vivid images while obtaining an extremely high compression ratio.

In other words, it can be obtained with the least amount of disk space and in better image quality. At the same time, JPEG is a flexible image format which can be compressed with different compression rates.

PNG: PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an emerging network image format. From the very beginning, PNG combines the strength of GIF and JPG intending to replace the two formats. PNG is currently the most undistorted format.

It takes advantage of both GIF and JPG, with rich storage format and color modes of GIF and JPG. Another feature is that it can compress image files to the limit for network transmission but retail all information related to image quality.

Its third feature is that the display speed is very fast, just download 1 / 64 image information to display a low-resolution preview image. PNG also supports the production of transparent images, which are useful when creating web images.

The weakness of the PNG format is that it doesn’t support animation effects. This is also the reason that it cannot replace GIF and JPG. 

In addition to above image formats, SVG, ICO, 2000, TIEF and PSD are also main image formats used in daily life. Besides, there are some non-mainstream image formats such as PCX, DXF, WMF, EMF, LIC, EPS, etc.

When you lose your important pictures because of virus attack, hard drive failure or other issues, you can use MiniTool Photo Recovery to find them back. It can help you recover your lost pictures very quickly.

Here is the detailed information for photo recovery: Look! 4 Ways to Recover Deleted Photos Windows 7/8/10