Diversity is great but not when file formats are concerned. You will hardly appreciate diversity when you have tons of images in the most special format on Earth, which however is impossible to read with a standard image processing program. While there are many standard and widely used image formats, there is still a variety of proprietary formats that need special software for viewing and editing.
Sometimes these proprietary formats can’t be viewed by anything else but the original program they were created with. However, in many cases it is possible to find a third-party program, which can open them. But still this is quite a lot of hassle, so maybe you would prefer the simplest way – to convert your rare format images into a more popular format (such as GIF, JPEG or BMP).
Format conversion is done easily with the help of format conversion software. Most image processing programs have options that allow to save an image into a different format. Sometimes the conversion is lossless, while in other cases when you convert the image to a different format you lose something, like the ability to use the layers in it (when you transfer from a format that supports layers to a format that doesn’t) or to add new colors (as is the case with indexed image formats).
Very often you are not bothered at all by the sacrifice you will have to make. For instance, if you don’t plan to edit the image further, it is not a problem at all that you will not be able to add a new color or to add/delete a layer. What matters is that you can view the image.
After you have decided that you are converting your images from its very special format to plain JPEG or GIF, the next step is to find the program to do it. If it were a couple of images, you can do it manually – i.e. open a program that reads the input format and can save an image as a GIF, JPEG or whatever format you need, select the Save as (or Export) command and that’s all.
But if you have tens, hundreds or even thousands of images, manually converting them from one image format to another can be a real challenge. The situation gets worse if you need to apply special conversion settings. In this case converting the images one by one is merely impossible. You need a profile that allows to save all the settings and apply them to all files. Such a profile is included in Image Converter Plus, so you’d better download the program and let it help convert the nonstandard format images into something that you can use easily.
Author: Ada Ivanova