Is changing Digital Photography Images Safe for Image Quality?
March 29th, 2009Some 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.
In fact, when you first got your pictures from the camera, transforming them is never the first step. Usually camera save pictures as JPG, and this is the format you will see on your hard drive But in the working memory, it becomes an uncompressed bitmap each time you open it and start working on 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. 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. 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. The best thing is to choose the format that is recommended by the editing software you are currently using. If you do this, when you mess up your work and return to the saved point, you will be able to follow all the previously taken steps. Only at the end save the image in as a standard picture file, JPG, TIFF, GIF, depending on its purpose.
It’s a myth that circulated for a while and says that if you want quality pictures, the cropping is not allowed. Cropping results may turn up better or worse than the original, but it all depends on the functions used Some algorithms eliminate extra unnecessary pixels, and others will simply enlarge existing pixels. print digital photos