Page "Spriting" Paragraph 38

After any of these methods are followed, the sprite artist will clean the image of any extraneous pixels unrelated to their illustration, apply proper transparency, especially to the blank canvas surrounding their illustration, and then export the image to a format suitable for sending to their client or friends.

The PNG and to a lesser degree, GIF formats are suitable, and JPEG is notable for not being so-the lossy nature of JPEG compression often mars some of the finer details of sprites, but more importantly, can shift the colors of a sprite's pixels.

Many videogames that use sprites require the sprites to use an exact, predefined palette of colors, and often create graphical effects by shifting these colors ; any colors outside of this scheme will cause this to fail.

Specific projects may convert the images to a proprietary format used internally by their game.