[Coco] Re: File extensions

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/20/04 7:39:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
mannslists at invigorated.org writes:

> But they do care! There are more than enough of these *people* we are 
talking
>  about that work in graphics that otherwise don't know how to use their 
> computer.
>  Several people I know, or am aquatinted with, come to mind. Also, most of 
the
>  *people* I know, have a preference as to which picture format they like the
>  best. (Normally it's JPEG.)

I agree that anyone working with pictures is very aware of which format 
they're using, but not for legal patent reasons.  For tradeoff of quality versus 
storage size, and suitability for different kinds of pictures.

FWIW, I'll just toss in my own preferences:

JPEG -- Best all around for color and B/W photos.  You can set the degree of 
compression to trade file size versus quality.  Too much compression will 
cause ghosting (like on TV) upon enlargement, but you can get LOTS of picture into 
a small file.

GIF -- Best for B/W line drawings, scanned text, and BMP files made with MS 
Paint.
Lossless compression, but forces colors into a 256 palette, causing a 
grainy/gritty look on a 24-bit color photo.  And won't compress color or gray-shades 
photos nearly as far as JPEG.

TIFF -- Lovely, lossless, and HUGE files.  I use these temporarily for 
editing, blowups, crops, etc., but when finished, convert results back to JPEG.

BMP -- for editing with MS Paint, which makes for a crude but effective 
zero-cost CAD/CAM program.  But when finished, I convert these juge files into 
16-color GIFs at something like 50x compression.  They can always be converted 
right back.
I convert even JPEG photos to BMP temporarily if I want to overlay text on 
them, or whatever.

??? -- I forget the name, but it's what Adobe photo editors use as working 
files.  "Working" is the key word here -- they're monstrous, so convert to JPG 
when finished.

Every one of the above is probably patented by someone, and the rights have 
been bought and sold and passed around like Britney at a wedding reception.  
Someone probably should get a penny every time I make a picture in one of those 
formats, but so far they haven't called me.  --Mike K.