Archiving Digital Photography (Part 5.2) (Saving Photos & File Formats)

Continued from yesterday's entry (Part 5)

A good solution for the job: JPEG

One of the most recognized and most universally accepted formats for photography the .jpg or JPEG file format. (Pronounced Jay-Peg) It is supported in web browsers and most image viewing applications and it's a great solution for storing images because of its ability to compress an image and still look great. The JPEG format is very widely used and accepted so it should be considered as an important part of your archive solution.

That said, there are some major drawbacks that we need to point out. First off JPEG files use “lossy” compression. Now, read the word carefully. I said “lossy” not “lousy”. “Lossy” means that every time you save your image you loose some data and the image degrades. Even if you save your image at 100% quality you are still losing infomation because of this compression. Another issue to keep in mind is the fact that every time you edit your image and save it again you are losing more quality. So as an archiving solution JPEG files should not be your first choice but a solution for easily and quickly viewing your final images. At the very least you need to keep an original JPEG file as a master and save files from the master each time you make edits. I would suggest investigating other “non-lossless” formats for archiving your original image files though and always working from those files when editing your image if possible. Then once you are happy with the final image, save another version as a compressed JPEG for quick reference and viewing later.

The new JPEG 2000 format is gaining popularity and it promises higher quality images but it is still “lossy” and will not retain all the original image information. Not to complicate things further but to clarify a common rummor, there is actually a “lossless” JPEG format but it doesn't compress nearly as well as the standard baseline JPEG format. Currently the “lossless” JPEG is a good example of an extinct file format because it is no longer supported by most major applications. There is also another new version called JPEG-LS which is also a lossless format but your guess is as good as mine if this format will ever catch on with the masses. Standard baseline JPEG is a wonderful format to work with when the job is right but as a pure archive format you should consider something lossless.

Article Author: Christopher Auman

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