Detail oriented vs “big picture”

Both image formats – JPEG and GIF are widely used in the web. But although they have something in common there are several things that differ them fr om each other. First of all, the number of supported colors with GIF is much smaller than JPEG. GIF supports only 256 colors, wh ereas JPEG supports millions of those. This means that when converting image from JPEG to GIF the resulting colors may look different, unless the colors picked out are supported by GIF. ImageConverter Plus supports dithering – with this option the resulting colors will look most close to the original ones. JPEG was originally designed to support 24-bit photographic style images. This format keeps track of all the colors and their gradations and makes the photographic image be much smaller than GIF. But the number of colors which is significantly larger in JPEG is not always an advantage – it will not yield a smaller file when dealing with low color level and details like in computer generated graphics. JPEG is much better for images containing lots of colors and their gradations. In case your image contains solid colors or text, then GIF is the way to go – it’s more detail oriented. Two other advantages of GIF are the ability to support transparency and animation.