TIFF, GIF, and PNG: get the picture?

GIF, JPEG, and PNG are most likely the best formats to use for three reasons. First, they're standardized and open formats for anyone to use. In addition, JPEG is an ISO standard and PNG is an IETF RFC (Internet Engineering Task Force Request for Comments-www.ietf.org) and W3C recommendation (World Wide Web Consortium-www.w3.org). Second, they're compressible. GIF files are generally compressed at 5:1, JPEG at 10:1 or 20:1 and PNG at about 7:1. Finally, they're all supported by web browsers. Well, pretty much. Microsoft's Internet Explorer doesn't support the alpha channel transparency for PNG-but, on the other hand, GIF and JPEG don't have the alpha channel at all. Use TIFF to archive your original pictures as it is a lossless format. Check out the summary table and sidebar for more information regarding these picture file formats.