02bunced — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:18:02 +0000

Not a problem. Welcome over to WMD James

DSMag — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 14:54:48 +0000

bunced - that is a good summary of image types. Thanks for sharing.

02bunced — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 15:08:36 +0000

Ok - a quick graphics lesson.

GIF - allows for only 256 colours on an image, but does also allow for transparency. Best for images you want a transparent background on or large blocks of colour. Each additional colour takes up more file space.

JPEG - no such colour limit, but is doesn't allow for transparency. The best for graphics like photographs or banners with lots of colours. It is what's known as a lossy file format - the smaller you want to compress the files, the more detail you'll loose on the picture and the less sharp the image will be.

PNG - a relatively new format for images, it has the best of both worlds. It offers fairly good compression on photographs (but not as good as JPEGs) and also what's known as alpha transparency. This is like transparency in GIFs but allows for pictures to be semi-transparent. The drawback is that the alpha transparency doesn't work on any version of Internet Explorer made so far, and that Adobe Photoshop doesn't like working with PNG images.

There you are - you have the information.

Look at your image and decide what you want to do with it and which format would be best. If you are unsure, just experiment!!