Hi All, I'm writing a Java program where I want to read in the ITERATES.TGA file produced by Fractint (using truecolor=yes). I am successfully able to read in the TGA header and get the image dimensions and maxiter information; here's my code for that: // read in header info dis.skip(12); b1 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b2 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); xdots = b1 + (b2 << 8); b1 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b2 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); ydots = b1 + (b2 << 8); System.out.println("xdots: " + xdots+ "; ydots: "+ydots); dis.skip(2); b1 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b2 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b3 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b4 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); maxiter = b1 + (b2 << 8) + (b3 << 16) + (b4 << 24); System.out.println("maxiter: " + maxiter); However, the trouble occurs when I try to read in the iteration values -- I think I've determined that there are three bytes per iteration value, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to shift/add the bytes to produce the iteration values I expect to see (1, 2, 3, etc.). Here's the closest I think I may have come to the correct code: b1 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b2 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); b3 = dis.readUnsignedByte(); System.out.println("b1-3 : "+b1+" "+b2+" "+b3); long iteration; iteration = b1 + (b2 <<8) + (b3 << 16); Looping through the entire file, all I ever get back is: b1-3 : 200 153 51 iter : 3381704 It doesn't matter where I am in the TGA file; the values returned never seem to change! Is it possible that my code is working, and the TGA produced by Fractint is simply "flat"? Unfortunately, I don't know of another way to check to see if the TGA actually contains iteration values or not. Any suggestions would be most welcome! Background: I'm writing a program that will read in the ITERATES.TGA file and write out an ASCII GRID file that can then be imported into Esri's ArcGIS (www.esri.com). My eventual goal is to be able to use ArcGIS' spatial analysis tools to analyze some characteristics of the Mandelbrot set. Thanks in advance for any thoughts or helpful responses! Cheers, Jason P.s. Tim, if you're reading this, yes, you helped me back in 1998 with a similar question when I was writing "Deeper" in C++. :-) -- Cheers from Mr. Tumnus! "Here... take my handkerchief." Hoofing it bare-chested since 1974.