| Extension | .pam |
| Category | images |
| Description | The PAM format (Portable Arbitrary Map) is a flexible and extensible image file format that supports a wide range of color spaces, pixel formats, and metadata. It was developed as part of the Netpbm project, which provides a suite of command-line tools for manipulating images in various formats. |
| Technical details | PAM files consist of a header section and a data section. The header section contains metadata about the image, such as its dimensions, color space, pixel format, and any additional properties or comments. The data section contains the actual pixel values, which can be stored in a variety of formats, including binary, ASCII, or compressed.
PAM supports a wide range of pixel formats, including grayscale, RGB, CMYK, YCbCr, and HSV, as well as alpha channels for transparency. It also supports various compression algorithms, such as gzip and bzip2, which can be applied to the data section of the file. |
