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Image MIME Reference
PaintShop-Pro-PSP

PaintShop Pro Image

image/x-paintshoppro
VS

Portable Bitmap

image/x-portable-bitmap
PBM

A complete technical comparison of PaintShop Pro Image and Portable Bitmap — covering compression, feature support, browser compatibility, magic bytes, and when to choose each format.

Equal browser support

Feature Support

Feature PaintShop-Pro-PSP PBM
Transparency (Alpha) Yes ✕ No
Animation Support ✕ No ✕ No
Progressive Loading ✕ No ✕ No
HDR Support Yes ✕ No
EXIF Metadata Yes ✕ No
ICC Color Profile Yes ✕ No
PaintShop Pro Image
image/x-paintshoppro
Extension
.psp.pspimage.tub.pat
Container PSP Chunk-based Format
Compression Uncompressed / RLE (Run-Length Encoding) / LZ77
Algorithm
RLELZ77
Color Depth 8-bit (Indexed), 16-bit (Grayscale), 24-bit (RGB), 32-bit (RGBA), 48-bit (High Color)
Developed by Jasc Software / Corel Corporation (Alludo)
Released 1990
Magic Bytes
7E 42 4B 00
Full PaintShop-Pro-PSP reference →
Portable Bitmap
image/x-portable-bitmap
Extension
.pbm
Container Netpbm
Compression Uncompressed
Algorithm
None
Color Depth 1-bit (Monochrome)
Developed by Jef Poskanzer (Netpbm Project)
Released 1988
Magic Bytes
50 31 (ASCII) or 50 34 (Binary)
Full PBM reference →

Browser Support Comparison

Browser PaintShop-Pro-PSP PBM
Chrome Chrome
✕ ✕
Firefox Firefox
✕ ✕
Safari Safari
✕ ✕
Edge Edge
✕ ✕
IE IE (Legacy)
✕ ✕
PaintShop-Pro-PSP

PaintShop-Pro-PSP Strengths

  • Provides robust, non-destructive editing capabilities with full support for vector layers, adjustment layers, and layer blend modes
  • Historically offered a highly capable and affordable alternative to Adobe Photoshop's PSD format for Windows users
  • Features proprietary support for 'Picture Tubes' (.tub), a unique brush technology that paints sequential or random raster objects along a path
Limitations
  • Deeply proprietary format tied exclusively to the Corel/Alludo ecosystem
  • Third-party software support (like GIMP or ImageMagick) is often limited to parsing older .psp files, frequently failing to render complex layers in modern .pspimage files
  • No support in modern web browsers; must be exported to a flattened web format (JPEG/PNG) for online viewing
PBM

PBM Strengths

  • Absolute structural simplicity allows parsers to be written from scratch with just a few lines of code
  • ASCII encoding allows manual editing and debugging directly within a standard text editor
  • Serves as a flawless, lossless intermediary for 1-bit raster data like scanned documents or barcodes
Limitations
  • Strictly limited to 1-bit monochrome images; cannot natively display shades of gray or color
  • Lack of compression results in extremely large file sizes, particularly when using the ASCII 'P1' encoding
  • No support for alpha transparency or modern metadata standards like EXIF

When to choose which format

PaintShop-Pro-PSP
Use PaintShop-Pro-PSP when…
  • PaintShop Pro Multi-layer Project Archival
  • Digital Art and Photo Retouching
  • Picture Tubes (.tub) and Custom Patterns (.pat)
PBM
Use PBM when…
  • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Pre-processing
  • Unix/Linux Command-Line Image Pipelines
  • Academic Image Processing Teaching

More comparisons

PaintShop-Pro-PSP vs ACES → PBM vs ACES → PaintShop-Pro-PSP vs APNG → PBM vs APNG → PaintShop-Pro-PSP vs AVCI → PBM vs AVCI → PaintShop-Pro-PSP vs AVCS → PBM vs AVCS → PaintShop-Pro-PSP vs AVIF → PBM vs AVIF → All comparisons →
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