What File Formats Do You Find Most Useful With Digital Art?

[Stephen Lo Piano]

I would like some input here on file formats if anyone would like to spend a couple of minutes answering here. Please indidcate if you are a Mac or Windows user since this will help determine what may be popular for crossover.

I personally save all my artwork in three file formats using a Windows XP, O/S.

1) Native format of program artwork was created in, this helps for going back to edit or other changes, layers stay in tact.

2) BMP as a sort of master copy and when possible for hard copy printing. This file format does not loose any quality of the digital image. One draw back is files can eat up a lot of memory space.

3) JPG for e-mail, or web page design, and any other situation where memory space is limited.

[justG]

I use XP. I save stuff in its original format, and that's it. I figure I can just use the application used to create it to export to another format if/when I ever need it.

- Gita

[Mivan]

I use psd, tif, bmp and jpeg on xp.

[AndyRage]

PNG is a very good format to use for keeping things at original quality, with some compression. It uses lossless compression with no colour reduction, and it store 8bit alpha information as well.

We use it internally in ArtRage for all our UI elements (the ones that aren't procedural, anyway).