Looking at Different Picture Files

February 19, 2010 at 2:41 am Leave a comment

Have you tried uploading your pictures from your digital camera? If yes, did you ever notice the extensions on your pictures? For example do you see me.jpeg, me.jpg, me.gif, me.tif, me.bmp, me.png? These are just examples of different picture file types.

The common graphics file types include JPEG (.jpg), TIFF (.tif), and bitmap (.bmp). The bitmap format (.bmp) is an older standard that creates needlessly large files. You get this file if you use applications like PAINT in windows. This fie type is rarely used. This wastes disk space and makes it difficult to send these pictures in e‑mail.

JPEG files are file types that most programs can read like Adobe Photoshop, Picasa among many others. They are also great for e-mails. You can also vary the amount of compression used to save a JPEG. Moreover, you can control the file size and image quality. However, JPEGs automatically compress your pictures when you save them, which reduce the visual quality by a small amount. If you use a high compression level, the image quality can be poor. This is in contrary to TIFF files. There is no loss in the picture quality of TIFF files. However, some programs, including most web browsers, cannot display pictures in TIFF format, the pictures can be very large and as a result, TIFF pictures consume hard disk space far more quickly than JPEGs.

There are other file types called GIF (.gif) and PNG (.png) that are commonly used on websites. However, JPEG works just as well. There are also files called RAW files that are created by many digital cameras as a high-quality alternative to JPEG. Many professional photographers choose to work with RAW files because it results in the best possible picture quality. There are a lot of RAW files and they are dependent on the manufacturer. For example, Nikon uses .nef while Canon uses .crw and .cr2.

These files are convertible to JPEG or TIFF. However, if you work with JPEG, it produces an imperfect copy of the original image displayed in the camera’s viewfinder. The difference cannot be seen but if you save the changes, you might see the difference in the long run. For the absolute best visual quality, save your JPEG pictures at the highest possible quality level or work in TIFF format.