Max resolution of .bmp file format

windows bitmap limit fractals mandelbrot
allanmb picture allanmb · Jun 19, 2015 · Viewed 7.2k times · Source

I have made a Mandelbrot fractal generator (who hasn't, I know) which can render directly to disk to generate huge fractals.

My first test was a UHD 4k resolution which turned out great (8-bit colour for all of these examples). So I decided to go a little crazy and went 10x bigger in both dimensions, i.e. 38400 x 21600. The resulting file doesn't appear valid in that Photoshop can't open it but even looking at the file properties in Windows Explorer shows that the dimensions/etc are missing.

I thought there was a chance that the limits were 32768 so I tried to go just under that by doing a 30000 x 30000. This still seems to be invalid.

Going down to 10000 x 10000 works fine so I am wondering what the limitations are of the file format?

File size shouldn't be an issue as even the 10x4k resolution file was under 1GB.

Answer

Parallel Park picture Parallel Park · Jun 19, 2015

It looks the maximum size of BMP can be 32Kx32K and 2Gx2G pixels. Here is the link I found.. http://www.fileformat.info/format/bmp/egff.htm

Related questions

How to display pixels on screen directly from a raw array of RGB values faster than SetPixel()?

I enjoy making "animations" in c++ such as a MandelBrot Set zoomer, Game of Life simulator etc. by setting pixels directly to the screen frame-by-frame. The SetPixel() command makes this incredibly easy, although unfortunately it's also painfully slow. Here is …

Read More
DirectShow - Getting video frames

I'm creating a Windows video capture application and am using DirectShow for capture. As each frame comes in, I want to grab it as a raw RGB bitmap into a buffer, at which point my code will do whatever processing …

Read More
Copying a bitmap from another HBITMAP

I'm trying to write a class to wrap bitmap functionality in my program. One useful feature would be to copy a bitmap from another bitmap handle. I'm a bit stuck: void operator=( MyBitmapType & bmp ) { HDC dcMem; HDC dcSource; if( …

Read More