Serializing and De-Serializing android.graphics.Bitmap

I recently took it upon myself to write a small application, a bit like Photoshop Express, for Android as a mechanism for learning how to develop on the Android platform. One problem that I stumbled across along was with saving (and subsequently loading) my custom images, which could consist of a number of different layers. At the heart of my application were a number of layers which consisted of android.graphics.Bitmap layers. I wanted to be able to save (serialize) this data without simply saving the masses of raw binary data from the Bitmap object (which would have been obscenely large)