As with other image editing programs, Photopaint can only use a file if it is saved in a file format that Photopaint recognizes. Photopaint recognizes a range of image file formats, including all the most important ones. If the file you want to open belongs to a format within this range you can open and save it directly in its own format, save as a native Photopaint file, or change it to any of the other formats that Photopaint supports.
Why are there different image file formats? The short answer is that the different technical requirements of the chief graphics media require appropriate formats. For instance, if you wish to print an image the most common formats are TIFF and EPS. Web graphics are commonly held as GIF, JPEG or PNG. Multimedia graphics use PICT (for Macintosh) and BMP (for Windows). It is obviously useful to be able to transfer images between the various standard formats and between these and Ability Photopaint’s own format (apx).
Some of the file formats display a dialog when you try to save an image in a new format. This is to enable you to set certain criteria for how the image will be saved, for example, the number of bits per pixel, whether the file is to be compressed, and so on.
When considering how large an image file will be, there are two factors you need to take into account: The dimensions of the image, that is, the height times width in pixels, and the amount of information stored for each pixel within the image. The latter is measured in bits per pixel, the higher the number the greater the amount of information e.g. 8 bits per pixel allows a color palette of 256 colors, which will therefore give a more "accurate" image than an image stored as 4 bits per pixel. The way an image is stored is therefore determined by the extent of the information on each pixel, the dimensions of the image, and the degree of compression applied to the image.
The full list of image file formats supported by Photopaint, along with their extensions, is as follows:
Macintosh PICT Images (pct, pic, pict)
Portable Bitmaps (pnm, ppm, pgm, pbm)
Portable Network Graphics (png)
No matter where it comes from, the image has to belong to one of the above formats if you are to be able to open or save it in Photopaint.
To save an image file of one format as an image file of another format, do the following:
Open the file e.g. File/Open and then locate the file in the Open dialog. The file will be opened in its own format i.e. with the extension that already belongs to it.
Next, to save the file in another format, select File/Save As. In the Save As dialog, select the format you wish to convert the image to from the Save as type drop-down menu. The name of the file will already be displayed in the File name line, although you can change it here if you like. Use the Save in box to locate the folder where you’d like the file to be saved. Click on Save.
At this point, depending on the file format you’re saving to, either the save will immediately be implemented and the image in its new format displayed on screen, or another dialog will appear. The dialog allows you to determine certain features of the image before it is saved to its new format. Note that most of the dialogs are identical or almost so, with only a few being different.
Once you’ve made your choices in the dialog, click on OK to save the image in the new format. At the top of the window, the file extension will change to the new extension. However, the changes to the new file will be visible only when the file is closed and opened again (this allows you to do further format changes and saves on the image as it appeared in its original format).
Note: The original image file remains unaffected (i.e. unedited and in its original format) by the Save As command.