Is changing Digital Photography Images Safe for Image Quality?

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7 April 2009

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People are usually afraid of working of plain Jpeg on their PCs after they collect them in that format from their digital photography apparatus, and are inclined in directly transforming them to tiff.

But transforming from JPG to something else has no relevancy as a first step of editing digital photography. The image is stoked onto your hard drive in a compressed format, named JPG. The image that is read by the virtual memory is uncompressed. Only at the time you want to save the edited image from you PC’s virtual memory you might raise the problem of file format: jpg, gif, tiff, png and so on. When you save the image, if you choose the option JPG, the memory image will get compressed using the JPG algorithm, but the image will still remain uncompressed in computer’s memory and it will reflect the original image along with all the processed changes you brought to it, without losing any information through the saving process. Only the saved JPG has less information because of the compression, what is located in the computer’s memory is unchanged as long as you save the file under a new name.

The main idea is that you should make intermediary saves while you work, so you can get a sort of restore point, from witch you can continue work in case something goes wrong. Make the intermediary saves in a digital photography format that stores high quality, maybe even uncompressed images , but also leaves the edited file intact, without flattening and closing layers. The best thing is to choose the format that is recommended by the editing software you are currently using. This way, all changes become editable and reversible when you open the saved image again. And finally, when you think you are done, choose a final saving format for the image from the conventional ones.

Another myth that is not true is the one that states cropping a digital photography image can modify its pixels. Rotating and resizing the image will produce the generation of a new image, based on the old one, and the result will be better or worse depending on the algorithm used. Some algorithms eliminate extra unnecessary pixels, and others will simply enlarge existing pixels. snapfish review