I read a very interesting article in a book I had bought for my dad, regarding file formats and how to save digital photographs. Most web-savvy folks think they know what file formats you should save your images in, but you’ll be pretty surprised that just by using a different file format, you’ll be saving your photos in an even higher quality than you were previously.

So here is the lowdown on the different file formats and where you should be using them:

JPEG Or .JPG Format

JPEG is a file format that uses a compression technology that looks for similar colour pixels and removes those that are not needed. Then when you open the file, it make a ”best guess” in order to put the file back together. The loss in quality is normally a result of the compression algorithm getting those “guesses” wrong or it creates unwanted blocks of pixels that are out of place. JPEG is usually the standard image format that most people use as it retains most of the picture quality and saves on disk space.
When to use JPEG: Use it when you want to send photos via email, when the image quality will be retained but the file size is kept to a minimum.

TIFF Format

TIFF is a “lossless” format in that it retains the best quality of the image but also uses up the most disk space. TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format, which means it stores a tag with the image that contains information about the colour and dimensions.
When to use TIFF: Use it for printing digital photos as it contains the highest image quality of all image formats.

GIF Format

GIF is another compressed format that was originally designed for the internet. It uses a very limited set of colours (256), and is perfect for graphics that have large even amounts of colour. When gradients and shading is introduced, the GIF format handles these situations very poorly. It makes gradients look “stepped”.
When to use GIF: Not recommended for digital photos, but perfect for graphics used on the internet that have large expanses of the same colours.

RAW Format

This is the file format that your digital camera uses before any camera processing is involved. It stores information about the camera used, the colours, size and dimensions. Usually the software the ships with your camera is able to edit these type of files. Not for the amateur!

PNG Format

PNG is another lossless file format that was created mostly to replace the GIF format. These days most designers use this format for graphics used in web design, as the quality is a lot better than the GIF format as well as it also supports transparency. There are also different types of PNG file format, which also increases or decreases the file size.
When to Use PNG: Ideal for internet use and has a better image quality than GIF.

What formats do I use?

I have mostly been saving my digital photos as high quality JPEG’s which I find works pretty well. Graphics on the other hand, I tend to jump between GIF and PNG, depending on what graphics I have created. Nonetheless, I’m sure this information will help you make a better choice when it comes to saving your digital photos or when creating graphics.