Bitmaps, or the older term rasters (so-called because display devices are called raster displays), are 2-dimensional arrays. Each element in the array is called a pixel which stands for picture element. Thus, a bitmap is an array of colors.

Looking at this number as a sequence of binary digits (bits), we can see that 2 colors (as in black and white) can be represented with 1 bit.

Grayscale graphics can be stored using 8 bits for each pixel. That is, each pixel contains a number from 0 to 255 (called the bit depth. ) representing a shade of gray from black to white.

Adobe Photoshop, GIF, Intel DVI, Paint, MIFF, PCX, and TIFF, to name a few, use or can convert bitmap file formatting.