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Photo
BMP: The standard bit-mapped graphics format used in the Windows
environment. By convention, graphics files in the BMP format end with a .BMP
extension.
GIF: Pronounced jiff or giff and stands for graphics interchange format, it is a
bit-mapped graphics file format. GIF supports color and various resolutions. It
uses data compression, but it is limited to a 256-color palette.
JPG: Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and pronounced jay-peg.
JPEG is a lossy compression technique for color images. Although it can reduce
files sizes to about 5% of their normal size, some detail is lost in the compression.
JP2: JP2 is the file extension for the new image format called JPEG2000 based
on the latest image compression technology.
PNG: Short for Portable Network Graphics, is a bit-mapped graphics format
similar to GIF. In fact, PNG was approved as a standard by the World Wide
Web consortium to replace GIF because GIF uses a patented data compression
scheme. In contrast, PNG is patent and license-free.
TIFF: Acronym for Tagged Image File Format, and is one of the most widely
supported file formats for storing bit-mapped images on personal computers.
TIFF graphics can be any resolution, and they can be black and white, gray-
scaled, or color. Files in TIFF format often end with a .tif extension.
Glossary (continued)