Design: Most Commonly Used File Formats in Digital Design

By Jennifer | Jun 9 2006 |

When you are creating designs digitally, you will come across many file formats. Here’s a brief explanation of what they all mean.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
Probably the most common of all file formats. It is used extensively on the web for photographic images. It has a small file size and can be good quality, but the downside is that it’s a “lossy” format – quality is lost when image compression is used to decrease file size. Repeated editing of JPEG’s results in a softening of the image and loss of detail. JPEG format supports CMYK, RGB, and grayscale colour modes.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
Again, this is a very popular format for web graphics. It is limited to 256 colours (8 bit palette). They are more suited for images such as logos or images using blocks of colour. They do not work well with photographic images but their advantage is that they use lossless data compression, thus reducing the file size is possible without a large loss of quality.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
Often pronounced “PING”, this is probably the third most popular file format for web graphics. It uses a lossless data compression method known as deflation. Like the GIF format, images can be edited without many of the problems linked with “lossy” file formats.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
This format produces excellent results and offers “lossless” compression. However the problem with TIFF’s is that they produce a very large file size. Some digital cameras are now shooting TIFF files, which are favoured over JPEGs by professional photographers. This format is often used when sending artwork to printers. TIFF is a flexible bitmap image format supported by virtually all paint, image-editing, and page-layout applications.

EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
This format is closely associated with desktop publishing programs. EPS files can contain both vector and bitmap graphics and is supported by virtually all graphic, illustration, and page-layout programs. When you open an EPS file containing vector graphics created in another application, Photoshop rasterizes the file, converting the vector graphics to pixels.

PDF (Portable Document Format)
This is used widely both for print and internet distribution. It is a flexible, cross-platform, cross-application file format. PDFs are device independent and resolution independent. PDF files accurately display and preserve fonts, page layouts, and both vector and bitmap graphics. In addition, PDF files can contain hyperlinks and even sound and video.

PSD (Photoshop Document)
This is the native file format of Photoshop. PSD is the default file format for newly created images inside Photoshop and the only format supporting all available image modes (Bitmap, Grayscale, Duotone, Indexed Color, RGB, CMYK, Lab, and Multichannel), guides, alpha channels, spot channels, and layers (including adjustment layers, type layers, and layer effects).

AI (Adobe Illustrator)
This is the native file format of Adobe Illustrator.

INDD (InDesign Document)
The native file format of Adobe InDesign.