The following table contains the formats that are considered most practical for the listed type of data, and can be used as a starting point. You can use a format with the appropriate character depth and one that provides either the most efficient use of space, or the fastest loading and saving capabilities.

Bear in mind that the following table represents recommendations only. To make an informed choice, read about each format in more detail in the section ImageGear Supported File Formats Reference.

Image Type	Recommended
Colors	JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, PNG, FlashPix
Grayscale/many shades	TGA, TIFF, JPEG, DICOM
Monochrome / high resolution	TIFF (CCITT Group 3 compression), TIFF (CCITT Group 4 compression)
Banking data	IBM IOCA, IBM MO:DCA (ABIC compression)
Noisy	Color: PNG, TIFF, JPEG; Bi-tonal: Group 3, Group 4
Lossless	GIF, TIFF, PNG, Group 3, Group 4, JPEG (Lossless JPEG compression)
Lossy	TIFF(JPEG compression), JPEG
Extra data to store	TIFF, EXIF-JPEG, EXIF-TIFF
Iconic images	ICO
Facsimiles	Group 3, Group 4
Multimedia	PNG, GIF, JPEG, AVI, MULTIMEDIA, QuickTime
Photographic images	Adobe PSD, Adobe PSB, PCD, JPEG, FlashPix
Internet images	GIF, JPEG, PNG, JPEG2000, WBMP
Macintosh paint programs	MAC, MAC PICT
PC paint programs and/or graphics arts	PCX, GEM, WMF, TIFF, EPS, MAC PICT, BMP
X Windows	XBM, XPM, XWD
Medical data	DICOM
CAD/Vector	EPS, WMF, DWF, DWG, DXF, CGM, DGN, HPGL, SVG, U3D
Document processing	TIFF, Adobe PDF, Adobe PS, EPS, PTOCA, TXT (ASCII Text)