Professional photographers or image editors often have mixed feelings about the use of JPG. On the one hand, they like this format because it doesn’t take too much space, it is easily compatible with any image viewer you can think of, on any type of device (including smartphones, tablets etc.), and it is the default format used by all image sharing websites, from Google to Facebook.
While most people describe SVG as a vector format containing vectors, animations or interactive graphics and supported by the largest part of web browsers, few know that SVGs can also store raster images. And the best part is that these raster images can handle alpha-channel and JPEG compression, which makes SVG a great alternative for the larger-sized PNG.
SVG is also a better alternative than WebP, JPEG2000 or JPEG-XR when it comes to web programming, as it is supported by Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer 9+ and Firefox — thus covering all major browsers.
The PCL (Printer Command Language) format was initially designed only for Hewlett-Packard inkjet printers in the 1980s, but in time it became a standard applied all over the printing industry. Though similar to PostScript in terms of features, PCL works faster and simpler. It is also less expensive, being an open language used almost universally by laser-jet printers.
JPEG is the most popular format for storing and sharing decent quality images or uploading them online. But in case you want to process a JPG file via a computer-aided design program such as AutoCAD, you will need to vectorize it. Or, in other words, turn it from a raster file made up of pixels — into a vector file made up of points, lines and curves.
Although PCX files used to be more popular a few years ago, when computer display hardware was still in its early days of development, you still might find yourself having to handle such a file today. Have you received a PCX image file by e-mail? Or discovered one on an old hard-drive? In any case, you will find such files are not supported by all image viewers, so handling them can be quite difficult.
For this reason, we recommend converting your PCX files to a more popular format, such as JPEG. Using JPEG makes things a lot less complicated when you plan to send you images by e-mail, post them on-line or store them without taking too much space on your computer. All you need to do is use a powerful converter, which will quickly allow you to transform all your PCX files into JPEGs.
In case you happened to find yourself having a group of TGA files (perhaps someone sent them by e-mail or transferred them to your computer) and are not sure how to handle them, here are some quick tips.
The TGA (Truevision Graphics Adapter) format was created in the 1980s by a company called Truevision as a raster graphics file format and it is also referred to as ‟TARGA (Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter) format”. Though the company doesn’t exist anymore under this name, the file is still widely used for storing deep-pixel images and graphics that contain image data up to 32-bits per pixel. You will often find TGA images associated with 3D video games or have them used for still-video editing.
In addition to supporting conversion to and from almost any image format you can think of, reaConverter also allows you to handle the most popular MS Word document files. Using this powerful software, you can now convert DOC, DOCX and RTF files to almost any available image format, including PDF.
NVA is a new and popular file format used particularly for storing ebooks and associated with a piece of software called NVA Reader. This program is optimized to work on all types of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Nexus phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, the Samsung Galaxy series etc.
Some of the main advantages of using NVA files are the possibility to select, highlight and underline text, make notes and add bookmarks. NVA files simulate the appearance of the print book really well and they preserve the structure, format and objects on each page. They also include handy search tools and features that facilitate sharing notes or quotes on social networks.
But if you have just downloaded or received by email an NVA file, you might notice it is not compatible with many other programs apart from NVA Reader. In case you want to convert it to a more accessible format, such as PDF, reaConverter can make this happen in a few seconds and without any quality loss. Additionally, reaConverter supports conversion from NVA to raster image formats, such as JPG, PNG or TIFF.
Most passionate photographers like to carefully control all kinds of details related to their photos — from adjusting colours and lights, to correcting red eyes or cropping. And for this reason, they prefer setting their camera to take pictures in RAW format. Also known as “digital negatives”, RAW image files have the great advantage of allowing a wide array of computer editing options.
If you like to take your quality photos with a Fujifilm camera and have just got the new X-E1 model, for example — you will soon discover your RAW image files have the RAF extension. This is the typical format for all Fujifilm cameras, and while generally preferred by photographers, it might prove difficult to handle at first. Why? Because RAF files are not recognized by many regular photo viewers, so you may have problems opening and editing them. Moreover, they have a very large size (up to 6 times more than a JPEG), so sending or moving a large group of photos might prove to be equally difficult.
