good old days of computing, keep this in
mind: In 1995 we had to negotiate hundreds
of image fi le formats, and no two
imaging programs spoke the same language.
These days, with just a handful
of common fi le types for digital photos,
we’re living on easy street. Even so, it’s
rarely obvious which fi le format is best
for a given image. Here’s a look at the
strengths and weaknesses of the three
most common digital-photo formats.
Go mainstream with JPEG: This format
is the default that digital cameras use to
save pictures, and every photo editing or
viewing program can read it. Because
you’re able to adjust JPEG’s compression
level, you can make your files smaller,
trading off image quality for portability.
If you’re a casual photographer who
shoots, prints, and shares without much
serious editing in between, stick with
JPEGs. Just be sure to set your camera to
capture pictures at the lowest compression,
which equates to the highest image
quality. You can always reduce the quality
later to shrink the fi le size, but you can’t
bring the lost image data back.
JPEG does have a downside. Every time
you make a change to a photo and save it,
you’re reducing the quality of the image.
It’s like making a photocopy of a photocopy:
Eventually the loss of detail will
become obvious (often painfully so), even
if you always employ the highest quality
setting available (see FIGURE 1 ).
TIFF maintains quality: The TIFF imagecompression
format is revered because
it’s lossless—no information is lost
during the compression (as opposed to
JPEG’s “lossy” compression). TIFF fi les
are larger than comparable JPEGs, but
nary a pixel or a shade of lavender is lost
when you create, edit, or save a TIFF.
With TIFF, you’ll neither have to deal
with the extra baggage that accompanies
the RAW format (which we’ll get to in a
moment) nor worry about JPEGs throwing
away some color information every time
you save a photo. For best quality, confi
gure your camera to save shots as TIFF
fi les, and keep saving them that way afterward.
Or save pictures on your camera at
the best JPEG quality and then, after you
edit them on your PC, choose File•Save As
and select TIFF (see Figure 2) . You might
lose an almost imperceptible bit of quality
with the fi rst JPEG save, but once the fi le
is a TIFF, the quality is locked in.
There is a drawback, however: TIFF
fi les are much larger than JPEGs, and the
TIFF format is not as universal as JPEG.
You’ll still need to save a copy of the TIFF
image as a JPEG if you want to share it
via e-mail or to place it on the Web.
Photo fanatics love RAW: To wring every
last drop of quality out of your photos, use
your camera’s RAW mode (if it has one).
RAW is lossless, and it offers more color
depth—12 bits of color per pixel, compared
with 8 bits per pixel for JPEG and
TIFF. This lets you extract more detail
from your photos in editing programs
such as Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop
Elements. Your camera saves RAW fi les
before any white balance, sharpening, or
other effects are applied. It’s an unprocessed
source fi le that offers you unlimited
creative freedom. Unfortunately, every
camera maker has its own fl avor of RAW,
and sometimes different models from
the same camera vendor vary in their
handling of
RAW. For example,
Nikon calls
its RAW files
‘NEF’, while Canon uses both ‘CRW’ and
‘CR2’. RAW fi les also require more work
on your part. You’ll have to apply white
balance, tweak the colors, and perhaps
add sharpening to the image. And since
you can’t save your changes to RAW fi les,
you’ll have to keep two copies of your
photos—the original RAW version and
the edited JPEG or TIFF fi le. Still, photo
fanatics wouldn’t have it any other way.
Try an alternative format: PNG is now
the default image-fi le format for screens
captured by Macs, and nearly all browsers
can open them. In addition, every
photo editing program offers its own
proprietary format. Photoshop’s PSD,
for in stance, is lossless, and it preserves
layers, so you can return to an editing
project right where you left off. However,
such proprietary formats usually can’t be
opened outside of the program that created
them, so you’ll eventually need to save
the fi les as JPEGs to share them.
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