Opening and saving a JPEG file 600 times
BEGINNER LEVEL
A .JPG file (JPEG file), everyone knows it! When you take a picture with your phone or when you publish a photo on FaceBook Or you go to Albelli ordering a photo album. .JPG files are used all over the world! You know the familiar file name from your camera like: DSC7354.jpg
A lot of years ago, other file formats were used that are now almost forgotten by everyone such as .TIFF or even older .BMP. Although .TIFF is still used by some photographers these 2 mentioned here are very bulky in terms of storage.
The picture below is 18.9 Mb in JPG format, if we save it as .TIF the size becomes 108.5 Mb. So 5.7 times the size!
Surely that huge amount of storage was something people wanted to get rid of. A 1989 patent was filed to make the normally so large photos more compact. How? A mathematical trick takes place and it looks at all the details in the photo. Now by leaving out small details that the human eye does not see anyway, the photo is made a little more compact. They call this technique lossy compression or to put it in Dutch compression with loss. After all, information is left out.
Below you can see in a video when you open and save a picture 600x. Each time it is saved it is checked whether any information can be left out by your graphics program. So if you open the picture again (then information has already been left out from the previous time) and save it again, information is lost again. See here the result, Please be patient as you will see changes after a few seconds:
Is this bad for my photos?
Yes then now the question is, is this bad for my beautiful vacation pictures you will think? Not at all! You can view photos infinitely, the quality is preserved, nothing is stored. It only goes "wrong" when you edit a photo in a graphics program.
Is there a solution?
Yes fortunately there is a solution to this problem. This is one of the reasons why professional photographers ( or the serious amateur ) chooses another format of his photos. And then we are talking about the so-called RAW format. With this format, not a single pixel is never lost. On your camera you will often see this in the menu item QUALITY settings. With this file format you can save your images infinitely without losing any information. So why do we still use .JPG files? Because a RAW file, as the name suggests RAW is English for 'raw'. It still needs all kinds of processing to make the photo a little brighter. But once you have the photo with your graphics program such as Adobe Lightroom made nice then you can save the nicely edited RAW there as a .JPG and give it to all your friends or family. And your family doesn't save a photo 600x, but views him hopefully more often 😉
The benefits of RAW will be the subject of a separate article later. So stay tuned!
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