Creativity is essential for a good designer and so is the image format. The effectiveness of a design is not only in design, but also in how well it is supported with an appropriate image format.

PSD – Photoshop Document

It is Photoshop’s native file format. This is layered file format proprietary to Adobe Photoshop. Sometimes it’s called PDD. It’s supports all image modes (Bitmap, Duotone, Grayscale, Indexed Color, RGB, CMYK, Lab, and Multichannel). Photoshop can convert the PSD file to BMP, ICO, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, GIF, Dicom, EPS, Large Document Format, PCX, PDF, RAW, PICT, Pixar, PBM, Scitex CT, Targa, TIFF and DCS.

BMP – Bitmap

Sometimes called DIB (Device Independent Bitmap) file format. Many older graphical user interfaces used bitmaps in their built-in graphics subsystems. In uncompressed BMP files, and many other bitmap file formats, image pixels are stored with a color depth of 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, or 32 bits per pixel. Uncompressed bitmap files are typically much larger than compressed image file formats for the same image.

GIF – Graphics Interchange Format

It is a Bitmap Image Format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987. The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. The colors are chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

EPS – Encapsulated Postscript

This is a DSC-conforming PostScript document with additional restrictions which is intended to be usable as a graphics file format. In other words, EPS files are more or less self-contained, reasonably predictable PostScript documents that describe an image or drawing and can be placed within another PostScript document.

At minimum, an EPS file contains a BoundingBox DSC comment, describing the rectangle containing the image described by the EPS file. Applications can use this information to lay out the page, even if they are unable to directly render the PostScript inside.

EPS, together with DSC's Open Structuring Conventions, form the basis of early versions of the Adobe Illustrator Artwork file format.

JPEG - Join Photography Experts Group

In computing, JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for photographic images. JPEG is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices; along with JPEG, it is the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web.

JPEG compression algorithm is at its best on photographs and paintings of realistic scenes with smooth variations of tone and color. For web usage, where the amount of data used for an image is important, JPEG is very popular. JPEG is also the most common format saved by digital cameras.

On the other hand, JPEG may not be as well suited for line drawings and other textual or iconic graphics, where the sharp contrasts between adjacent pixels can cause noticeable artifacts.

PSB – Large Document Format

The Large Document Format (PSB) supports documents up to 300,000 pixels in any dimension. All Photoshop features, such as layers, effects, and filters, are supported. You can save high dynamic range, 32‑bits-per-channel images as PSB files. Currently, if you save a document in PSB format, it can be opened only in Photoshop CS or later. Other applications and earlier versions of Photoshop cannot open documents saved in PSB format.

PDF – Portable Document Format

Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. The file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents. Lately, 3D drawings can be embedded in PDF documents with Acrobat 3D using U3D or PRC and various other data formats.

RAW

A camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image scanner, or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor. Sometimes called Digital Negatives. Normally, the image is processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal colorspace where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a "positive" file format such as TIFF or JPEG for storage, printing, or further manipulation, which often encodes the image in a device-dependent colorspace. These images are often described as "RAW image files", although there is not actually one single raw file format.

PICT

PICT is a graphics file format introduced on the original Apple Macintosh computer as its standard metafile format. It allows the interchange of graphics (both bitmapped and vector), and some limited text support, between Mac applications, and was the native graphics format of QuickDraw.

Pixar

The Pixar format is designed specifically for high-end graphics applications, such as those used for rendering three-dimensional images and animation. Pixar format supports RGB and grayscale images with a single alpha channel

PBM – Portable Bitmap Format

The portable bitmap format are image file formats originally designed to be easily exchanged between platforms. The PBM format was invented by Jef Poskanzer in the 1980s as a format for monochrome bitmaps that could be transmitted within an email message as plain ASCII text, allowing it to survive any changes in text formatting.

The ASCII based formats allow for human-readability and easy transport to other platforms, while the binary formats are more efficient both at saving space in the file, as well as being easier to parse due to the lack of whitespace. When using the binary formats, PBM uses 1 bit per pixel, PGM uses 8 bits per pixel, and PPM uses 24 bits per pixel: 8 for red, 8 for green, 8 for blue.

TARGA – Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter

Truevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible PCs to support Highcolor/truecolor display. This family of graphic cards was intended for professional computer image synthesis and video editing with PCs; for this reason, usual resolutions of TGA image files match those of the NTSC and PAL video formats. The format can store image data with 8, 16, 24, or 32 bits of precision per pixel– the maximum 24 bits of RGB and an extra 8-bit alpha channel.

TIFF - Tagged Image File Format

Tagged Image File Format is a file format for storing images. Originally created by the company Aldus As of 2009, it is under the control of Adobe Systems.

TIFF is a flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file. TIFF file can be a container holding compressed (lossy) JPEG and (lossless) PackBits compressed images. A TIFF file also can include a vector-based clipping path.

PNG – Portable Network Graphics

Portable Network Graphics is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. PNG images can either use palette-indexed color or be made up of one or more channels. PNG offers a variety of transparency options. With true color and grayscale images either a single pixel value can be declared as transparent or an alpha channel can be added.

SVG – Scalable Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics is a family of specifications of an XML-based file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and dynamic.

The SVG specification is an open standard that has been under development by the W3C since 1999.

SVG images and their behaviors are defined in XML text files. This means that they can be searched, indexed, scripted and, if required, compressed. Since they are XML files, SVG images can be created and edited with any text editor, but specialized SVG-based drawing programs are also available.