Is Editing Digital Photography Images Safe for Image Quality?

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4 April 2009

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Some say that after you have your high quality, high resolution pictures and you want to put them on your hard drive and work on them for a little bit, it’s best to transform first the Jpeg files that come from you camera to tiff or other appropriate format, because working on jpegs might cause you to loose quality and color.

But transforming from JPG to something else has no relevancy as a first step of editing digital photography. Usually camera save pictures as JPG, and this is the format you will see on your hard drive But the Pc’s virtual memory will unravel the image when you open it. Format issues can only arise after editing what you want and saving the final image. Compressing during a save does not affect the quality of the initial uncompressed image with the changes it now has that is still located in the virtual memory and will remain there until you close the editing program. The only quality changes are visible in the saved JPG, with because of the compression it’s normal to have less information.

It’s normal to make intermediary saves when changing a photo’s appearance because you never know what could go wrong. These intermediary save will always be done under a format that is especially made for editing, that saves both quality and allows changes to become editable. So this basically means you should save the intermediary images in the format that is specific to your photo editing software. Failing to do this will return an intermediary save that acts just like another image. And finally, when you think you are done, choose a final saving format for the image from the conventional ones.

It’s a myth that circulated for a while and says that if you want quality pictures, the cropping is not allowed. 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. There are shrinking algorithms that eliminate extra pixels, and enlarging ones that make the pixel dots bigger. snapfish review