Images are usually some obscure binary files. Their most common formats, PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIF are well documented and supported by many software tools. Libraries and APIs exist for accessing these formats, but also a phantastic free interactive software like Gimp. The compression rate that can reasonably be achieved when using these format is awesome, especially when picking the right format and the right settings. Tons of good examples can be found how to manipulate these image formats in C, Java, Scala, F#, Ruby, Perl or any other popular language, often by using language bindings for Image Magick.
There is another approach worth exploring. You can use a tool called convert to just convert an image from PNG, JPG or GIF to XPM. The other direction is also possible. Now XPM is a text format, which basically represents the image in ASCII graphics. It is by the way also valid C-code, so it can be included directly in C programms and used from there, when an image needs to be hard coded into a program. It is not generally recommended to use this format, because it is terribly inefficient because it uses no compression at all, but as intermediate format for exploring additional ways for manipulating images it is of interest.
An interesting option is to create the XPM-file using ERB in Ruby and then converting it to PNG or JPG.
