digital photography,...which format is best ?

[yomaddog]

Anyone know about digital-photography ?

Here's the deal:

My wife uses several devices & editing programs,...each have their own "save-as" with a drop-down menu of different formats...she has been using .jpg, but losses quality when resizing, & editing... & not all of them have the same format choices,... anyway, heres a list of her various hardware & software with each of their available formats,...

digital camera--- .jpg

scanner--------- .jpg .bmp .tif .pcx .png .gif .fpx

all editing software- .jpg .bmp .tif .pcx .png .gif .tga .psf


P.S.--- does image quality deteriorate when changing formats ?

What's your advice?

 

[Davey7549]

yomaddog
Jpeg will lose quality every time it is compressed and decompressed. The dilemma is the digital camera stores in Jpeg to save size on storage media. If you are going to do many changes and save/opens then the best you can do is convert the jpeg immediately to a bmp and do all your work saves and so on in bmp format until the final product is rendered then save as Jpeg for future use.
Note: there is no quality loss in bmp format.
Dave

 

[yomaddog]

Awwww-shucks,...

...now that I have an answer for her, I gotta get off this thing...

-but thanks,..your gonna save me a lot of photo-paper!!!

 

[jbcalg]

similar to what davey said

i use photoshop and save in their format (.psd) from the camera's jpg

do all the sizing, enhancements, etc, then save final product back into jpg for web based product and .tif for print shop quality work and production

 

[slipe]

I use TIFF because it is loseless and universal. My film scanner gives a 30Mb scan and I was using LZW compression with TIFF but they took too long to decompress in bunches.

Good tutorial: http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html

 

[Kirkland]

Originally posted by yomaddog
Anyone know about digital-photography ?

Here's the deal:

My wife uses several devices & editing programs,...each have their own "save-as" with a drop-down menu of different formats...she has been using .jpg, but losses quality when resizing, & editing... & not all of them have the same format choices,... anyway, heres a list of her various hardware & software with each of their available formats,...

What's your advice?

I'm still a bit mystified as to why your camera doesn't let you select .bmp or some other format? Next time, click on the arrow in the "SAVE AS" window: clicking the arrow usually lets you choose which format.

And as has been advised, I "save" ~everything~ to my .bmp "storage" folder. From there, I copy the originals to a "works in progress" folder.
**Keeping your original bitmaps also lets you go back to them for as many copies as you need without corrupting the original scan/digital camera image/copy.
***Whenever you need to do some work, do it from your "works in progress" folder. Do the workups then save the finished work to an "output folder." That way, you'll never corrupt the orginal scans/images.