Raster Images in Drawings

Raster images consist of a rectangular grid of small squares or dots known as pixels. For example, a photograph of a house is made up of a series of pixels colorized to represent the appearance of a house. A raster image references the pixels in a specific grid.

Raster images, like many other drawing objects, can be copied, moved, or clipped. You can modify an image with grip modes, adjust an image for contrast, clip the image with a rectangle or polygon, or use an image as a cutting edge for a trim.

The image file formats supported by the program include the most common formats used in major technical imaging application areas: computer graphics, document management, engineering, mapping, and geographic information systems (GIS). Images can be bitonal, 8-bit gray, 8-bit color, or 24-bit color. Images with 16-bit color depth are not supported.

Several image file formats support images with transparent pixels. When image transparency is set to on, the program recognizes those transparent pixels and allows graphics in the drawing area to “show through” those pixels. (In bitonal images, background pixels are treated as transparent.) Transparent images can be gray-scale or color.

Supported Raster Image File Formats

Format	Extension
Adobe Photoshop Format	.psd
Arc/Info ASCII Grid Format	.asc, .txt
Arc/Info Binary Grid Format	.adf
Autodesk Animator	.fli, . flc
CALS Type	.cal, .mil, .rst, .cg4, .gp4, .cals
DDS (HDR) Format	.dds
Digital Terrain Elevation Data	.dt0, .dt1, .dt2
ECW Compressed Image Format	.ecw
FAST-L7A	.fst
GIS-GeoSPOT	.bil, .bip, .bsq
Graphics Interchange Format	.gif
HDR Format	.hdr, .pic
ILM OpenEXR Format	.exr
Image Systems CCITT Group 4	.ig4
JPEG File Interchange Format	.jpg, .jpeg
JPEG2000	.jp2, .j2k
Macintosh PICT	.pct, .pict
MrSid	.sid
Native Format DOQ	.doq, .nws, .nes, .ses, .sws
NITF	.ntf
Portable Network Graphics File	.png
QuickBird Tagged Image File Format	.tif, .tiff
RLC	.rlc
Tagged Image File Format	.tif, .tiff
Truevision Targa	.tga
USGS Digital Elevation Model	.dem
Windows Bitmap	.bmp, .dib, .rle
ZSoft PC Paintbrush	.pcx

Note: Although the file name extension is listed in the previous table, the file format is determined from the file contents, not from the file extension.