file types < help

• PDF
• BMP
• PICT
• EPS
• JPG
• Spot Colour
• CMYK
• Black & White
• Black & White reversed
• Greyscale

All the brand standards manuals available on the e-see® system are Adobe Acrobat® PDF files. PDF is an excellent way of producing on-line publications.

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader v.3 to open these files. If you don’t have this installed, go to www.adobe.com and download a free self installing acrobat reader application (contact your system administrator if you have any queries). It is preferable that you are on the latest version of the Acrobat Reader.

PDF files can be used on any computer platform. They are not dependent on any particular operating system. You can print directly from the PDF file without having the original text and images that made up the PDF, and it is very difficult to distinguish it from the original.

BMP is very suitable for on-screen display and small in-house publications.

BMP is the standard Windows bitmap image format on DOS and Windows compatible computers. It is used mainly for bitmap graphics, photographic images and images created in paint applications. It has the option of using the RLE (run length encoding) compression scheme, which is lossless, that is, it does not discard detail from the image.

For example, use a BMP to display in a word processing document (such as MS Word ®) or a spreadsheet (such as MS Excel®)

The PICT format is very suitable for on-screen display and small in-house print.

The PICT format is widely used amongst Apple Macintosh graphics and page layout applications. The PICT format is very effective at compressing images that contain large areas of solid colour. Like the BMP format, the colour depth can be set to achieve a better result.

The format can be used by all high-end desktop publishing software.

EPS files are the most commonly used file format for output by high-resolution image setters. EPS is primarily suitable for vector graphics. Draw programs (Clarisworks, Freehand, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Corel Draw , etc) can create EPS files when graphics need to be imported into other programs. EPS files may or may not include a low-resolution preview image, which allows users to see what the image looks like before they import it into another program. EPS is the format to use when you are outputting for professional use.

JPEG format is commonly used to display photographs and other continuous tone images. JPEG uses a compression scheme that effectively reduces file size considerably by identifying data that is not essential to display the image. When you open a JPEG image, it is decompressed back to its original file size. JPEG is referred to as a "lossy" format. Once an image has been compressed and then decompressed it will not be identical to the original. In most cases, compressing an image using the maximum quality option will produce a result that is no different from the original. JPEG is used on the Internet to reduce download times of large image files, and is very suitable for a variety of applications.

Spot colour files only contain the necessary colour information for printing. For example the e-see® logo only contains one colour, so when it is sent to a printer for printing only one colour plate is produced to print the logo. Using spot colours is the most accurate way of reproducing colours.

CMYK, or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black are the four primary colours used for printing. When a CMYK image is to be produced, four plates are manufactured for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. When these colours are combined on the print press the image is produced. Unlike spot colours, CMYK has a limit of colour it can produce. It is difficult to reproduce colours using the CMYK method. CMYK is also known as PROCESS colour. Nearly all magazine publications are printed using CMYK as they will contain photographic images. Your print company will produce the required colour plates to simulate the spot colours and the CMYK colours. CMYK is also the print method used on desktop computer printers and in-house colour laser printers. You should choose to use a CMYK image if you wish to print to these types of printers as you will get a better colour match than using a spot colour version.

Black and white files only contain one colour - black. They do not produce any tonal values.

Reversed Black and White files where the normal Black image is represented by White on a Black background. Black and white files only contain one colour - black. They do not produce any tonal values.

An 8-bit colour mode that stores and displays images using 256 shades of Grey that range from black to white. Each colour is defined as a single value between 0 and 255, where 0 is darkest (black) and 255 is lightest (white). An image that uses the greyscale colour model.(Greyscale images ) especially photographs , are commonly referred to as black and white . Greyscale is ideally suited to producing realistic looking images where no colour is available – essentially looking like a "black and white" photo.