PICT Image Format in Photoshop

PICT, for Macintosh Picture, is a format developed by Apple as its main format for Mac graphics. It is based on the QuickDraw screen language. And although many Mac programs support PICT, I don’t recommend using it for any images that you plan to print. PICTs are notorious for being absurdly slow in the printing department. Today, PICT images are usually used for graphics to be incorporated into slides, screen presentations (such as PowerPoint), multimedia projects, and digital video. PICT supports RGB (with a single alpha channel), Indexed Color, Grayscale, and Bitmap (without alpha channels) image modes. Make sure that QuickTime is running if you want to save a file as a PICT. Here are the options that appear in the PICT File Options dialog box:


-->Resolution: Options for grayscale images are 2, 4, and 8 bits per pixel. Options for color images are 16 and 32 bits per pixel. Under no circumstances should you change the default option. If you do, you delete colors from your image, and you cannot access the compression settings.

-->Compression: The compression settings for PICT are more limited than those for the regular JPEG format. Be aware that the compression scheme used for PICTs causes even more degradation to your image than with JPEGs. To minimize the damage, always select the maximum quality setting.