Images (.PNG .JPEG .GIF .TIFF .SVG and raw images)
Introduction
Are you a photography student? Are you doing photography on the side? Do you just want to learn about image formats? Well do i have some good news for you dear reader, this post is going to help.
PNG
Portable Network Graphics
This file format was originally made for sending images over the internet. Oh good ol intenet! PNG's also using lossless compression so this means their file sizes are bigger in comparison to JPEG. The advantage to PNG's is transparency for the background. This means you can insert the image into anything that takes image files and the image will have no background.For example if you had a bench there with a white background for a JPG the white background would be there. But with a PNG the only thing that will be there will be the bench.
JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group
JPEG's save a lot of storage space due to lossy compression. Some of the pictures data is discarded. This is done by taking every 8x8 block of pixels into 64 standard patterns. The blocks with more checkerboard like pattens have some of the pixels removed therefore less data. This does mean that the images in the jpeg format are less sharp. In turn, around 10% of the data for the orignal image is taken when compressed into the jpeg format.
GIF Graphical Interchange Format
GIFs use something called lossless compression. The GIF format also allows said images to be animated as seen on most social media pages to date (take a peak down at the bottom of the post, that down there is a GIF). So whats the drawback to GIF? Well they're are restricted to 256 colours only. That may sound like a lot but when you look at the common GIF you will notice that it looks grainy when coming to more complex images.
TIF Tagged Image Format
Tif does support compression however it also supports uncompressed images as well as many other colour spaces and other options. This makes it popular among photographers and printers.
SVG Scalable Vectors Graphics
This file type allows the resize of images without and quality lost at all! However keep in mind this fact makes file sizes bigger than the averaege common JPEG
Raw image Negative Format
This file type works sort of like old photography film does. The file isnt the image its self but it is the data to make up the image. The only problem with this is this format needs special codex to open on a image editor. However this format opens up the possibility of more editing options.
Thank you for reading this post.
