Photoshop Elements 5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2: Importing, Managing, and Saving Your Photos 57

Saving Your Work

• PIXAR. Yup, that Pixar. This is the special format for the movie studio’s high-

end workstations, although if you’re working on one of those, it’s extremely

unlikely that you’re reading this page.

• Scitex CT. A format used for prepress work in the printing industry.

• Photoshop Raw. This format isn’t the same as your camera RAW file, but rather

an older Photoshop format that consists of uncompressed data.

• Targa TGA, or Targa, is a format developed for systems using the Truevision

video board, but it has become a popular graphics format.

• PCX. A bitmap format used on different platforms.

About JPEGs

In the next chapter, you’ll read about how throwing away pixels can lead to

shoddy-looking pictures (page 88). Well, certain file formats were designed to

make your file size as small as possible. They make the file smaller by throwing out

information by the bucketful. These formats are known as lossy because they throw

out, or lose, some of the file’s data every time you save it, to make the file as small

as possible.

Sometimes you want that to happen, like when you want a small-sized picture for a

Web site. Therefore, many of the file formats that were developed for the Web,

most notably JPEG, are designed to favor smallness over any other quality. They

compress the file sizes by allowing some data to escape.

NOTE Formats ...