Digital Light & Color

Hello

I have written a little program for calculating my calendars, with some special features i missed in PWP-Calendars (like filling incomplete weeks at the beginning and end of the months or automatic coloring of sundays and hollidays).
Not having many expierience in graphics programming, so I save the calendar files as BMP, which is standard graphics save mode in my compiler (Powerbasic).
I do not think to have big disadvantages when saving as BMP in correlation to save as TIFF, but i would like tho know the oppinion of the collective wisdom here.
My graphic uses a very limited set of colors, usually black, pure red for sundays and hollidays and some shades of grey for the filling days and saturdays, so i do not see why there could be a difference in saving to TIFF instead of BMP.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts

The only difference - assuming you are saving as a 24-bit color BMP - is that most BMP files do not include a profile

Thanks Jonathan

Yes, I save as 24-Bit.
Having no profile is not a problem since I have mostly shades of grey and pure red.
I convert the files to sRGB (Working CS) when opening in PWP, and the pure red stays 255/0/0.
I keep my calendar-sheets in sRGB because this gives best results at my current printshop.
So i can keep my program simple now, but when having some peace and quiet time, i will go deeper in the graphic stuff and try to implement a "Save as TIFF" function.

Somewhat off topic: what info does BMP header contain? I've heard of 'raw' bitmaps (i.e. just pixel data, no headers, no metadata) - I'm not sure if there is a standard format for them. What would be a raster format that would by default contain minimum extra information on the image?

The size of the BMP header is minimal. BMP V4 headers may include a profile and thus can be somewhat larger.

It may seem a strange question: is there a 'standard' image equivalent of ASCII text file - just readable pixel values and nothing else?

BMP comes close to it. You do need a little information in addition to the pixel values, such as the x,y dimensions of the image and the bit depth. Essentially that's what is in the header. The header may also contain a color palette to support indirect color files. These were especially common in the early days of the PC. You might have between 16 or 256 distinct colors in an image. The image was then stored as two or one pixel per byte with the values being a four or eight bit index into the color palette.

Kiril