Which format usually works best for photos?

Answer 1

This depends on what you mean by "most flexible."

Most digital cameras can save to a JPEG format - a good choice at better quality settings (60% and higher). JPEG files work great for web sites, email and texting. They are not great for printing.

Some cameras can also save to a RAW format or to a TIFF format. These two can provide excellent quality, but create much bigger file sizes. These formats are not great for online uses.

Note that a RAW or TIFF file can easily be saved to a JPEG format at a smaller size with good results. This is a one-way path. JPEG files make terrible TIFFs and cannot be converted to RAW files.

Below is a run down of file format choices for saving digital photographs and other similar images. It starts with the best image quality formats and moves on down to lesser quality formats.

RAW (DNG, NEF, etc.)

Technically, the most flexible format to save digital photos in is RAW.

RAW files contain all of the information that is captured by the camera. A RAW file will give you the most flexibility in terms of editing an image in software. With this format, you can often pull out detail in highlights and shadows that may seem to be lost.

You can also change the color temperature so that colors look more natural - meaning they won't have a blue, orange, yellow, or green cast to them. Most software that handles RAW files can save your modified images to a different file, so you never lose any of the information in the original. This other file can be in any format and any size you want.

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture are the types of programs that can do handle RAW files in this manner. Both Nikon and Cannon also have programs that can handle RAW image files.

Professional photographers tend to use the RAW file format.

The downside with this format is that file sizes can be huge (12-50MB+). Another downside is that not all programs can handle RAW files. They are too large to email and will not render in a web browser. Most people receiving RAW files will not be able to view them. You cannot use them in a PowerPoint presentation.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)

The next most flexible format - technically speaking - would be TIFF.

These files are also large, but they do not have all of the information available in the RAW format. Both RAW and TIFF files are better used for print applications.

TIFF works well in a PowerPoint presentation and in a lot of other document creation programs (Word, Publisher, Pages, Quark, InDesign, etc.). It is a universal file format across Macintosh and Windows platforms, as well as many others.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics)

PNG files are the next most flexible format you could use - both technically and otherwise.

They can hold about as much information as a TIFF file, but they can be smaller. PNG files can be rendered in a web browser and can be emailed.

When saving PNG files, you have a choice of 24 bit color (lots of colors) or 8-bit color. The latter choice throws away most of the colors in your image and keeps only 256 of them. This can lead to posterization. If you've ever noticed backgrounds on your TV that look like they are made of bands of color instead of smooth shading, that was posterization in action.

Although web sites can display PNG files, not everyone you mail these files to will be able to open them. The preview programs that come with Macintosh and Windows computers can usually display PNG files, but there is no guarantee that the person you email these to will know what to do with them.

PNG files can be useful in PowerPoint presentations because they support transparent backgrounds. RAW, TIFF and JPEG files do not support transparent backgrounds. Transparent backgrounds are useful if you do not want your graphic to be in a white rectangle.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group)

Which brings us to JPEG files. In terms of sending pictures to other people by email or text, or whatever, JPEG is the most flexible.

Often, JPEG is the best choice for saving photos.

JPEGs can work well in PowerPoint presentations.

Please note that JPEG is not good for simple graphics that are made of flat areas of color - like logos. This format can make those graphics look muddy - particularly at lower quality settings.

JPEGs work great for photographs or any graphic with smooth transitions from dark to light, or from one color to another.

When you save a photo to JPEG, you will have a choice of selecting the quality or file size of the file you save. Remember this: the best quality image will give you a larger file size. The smallest file size will give you the worst quality image. There is a lot of flexibility here.

The highest quality JPEG will look as good as a TIFF or PNG formatted image. The lowest quality (smallest file size) JPEG can look terrible.

One problem is that once you save a photo in a low quality JPEG format, you can never get it back to a better quality image. That's because the process throws picture information away and it cannot be recovered - unless you still have the original file saved at the highest quality.

So, for best results, save your JPEG images at 60% or better (like 100%) quality. You can always make a copy that is smaller and more compressed. Even the simplest photo editing software will be able to take a larger JPEG photo and shrink it down in size and quality so you can more easily email or text it.

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)

Never use GIF as a format for saving photos. It throws too much information away.

The beautiful photos you are used to seeing have millions of colors in them. The best quality GIF has only 256 colors. Some have only 8 colors. They fake the other colors by using an ugly dot pattern. Please don't do this at home, on the run, or anywhere, ever.

GIF files are good for small animations. They are not good for photographs. A plus for GIF files is that they support transparent backgrounds. They can be good for small graphics with only a few colors (like a logo).

BMP (Bitmap)

The BMP file format is only used on Windows computers. It is a proprietary format that Microsoft developed. Although very useful and flexible on a Windows computer, it has limited applications in other Operating Systems (Macintosh, IOS, Android, etc.). It is not a good choice for email, texting or web sites.

BMP can be used to save good quality or poor quality images. In the early days of the internet, BMP was used a lot for images. These were very low quality images with very few colors in them. They used a lot of dots to fake other colors. Think very early Video Games.

(Apologies to the original poster of this answer.)

Answer 2

Capturing an image to a camera raw file format is the best option if your camera is capable of producing it .because raw files are digital negatives which contain all the exposure, color information of the captured area ,this will give you lots of space to enhance the image later using image editing applications such as Photoshop ,Light room etc.

Answer 3

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