Topic summary

.tga

.tga

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Truevision TGA.

TGA files commonly have the extension ".tga" on MS-DOS, Windows, and macOS (older Macintosh systems use the "TPIC" type code). The format itself permits any pixel bit depth up to 255, of which up to 15 bits can be dedicated to an alpha channel; however, the only bit depths supported in practice were 8, 15, 16, 24, and 32, where the 16- and 32-bit formats used 1 and 8 bits respectively for the alpha channel. Color data can be color-mapped, or in direct color or truecolor format. Image data may be stored raw, or optionally, a lossless RLE compression similar to PackBits can be employed. This type of compression performs poorly for typical photographic images, but works acceptably well for simpler images, such as icons, cartoons and line drawings.