Is changing Digital Photos Images Safe for Image Quality?

By marke | Mar 29, 2009

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.

In fact, when you first got your pictures from the camera, transforming them is never the first step. 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. 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.

It’s normal to make intermediary saves when changing a photo’s appearance because you never know what could go wrong. But when making these saves, be sure you make them under a digital photography format that does not only allow you to keep the image quality but can also save the image layers you might be working on. 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. Only when you are done editing you can same the image in a conventional format like JPG for online photo sharing, TIFF for images that are meant to be printed at high resolutions and so on.

Another myth that is not true is the one that states cropping a digital photography image can modify its pixels. 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

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