Siberian Tiger
Canon 350D f5 @ 1/400sec: Canon 100 – 400mm IS zoom lens

This article will either be useful to you or be no benefit whatsoever. The taking of the picture is normally the easy part you point the camera at what you want to take a picture a picture off and press the button and you have a perfect image (we hope).

But have you ever considered the format of the file, probably not, that is unless you a more advanced photographer, many people are just concerned with talking the picture and seeing what results we have achieved when we down load it our computers.

However, there a number of formats that is available to us;

JPEG of JPG: Every one of us will be familiar with this format it what every camera and every piece of software recognises, developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group hence the term JPEG. The format uses what is know as a ‘lossy’ compression method. Every time you open and save the image some information is lost. Don’t worry normal viewing will not degrade the image. However, if you keep editing the image eventually it will degrade to such an extent that that it will not able to be used.

Tagged Image File Format (TIFF): This is the most universally recognised image format, most the of big printing companies, magazines and stock agencies require their images in this format. It’s a lossless format in that no matter how times the file is worked it will not degrade. Unfortunately the file sizes are massive compared with JPEG, a 8megapixel shot in JPEG may be 2 or 3 MB depending on the compression, however the same image in TIFF could 25MB or larger a bit of difference don’t you think.

RAW: RAW doesn’t really stand for anything, it’s unique to each camera manufacturer and only the top end cameras will be able to operate this format, when you take a picture in JPEG the camera will apply some processing to the image i.e. white balance. However in RAW no processing takes place, when the image is down loaded it must be processed and then converted the manufacturer will provide the necessary software for this, or there are software packages on the market that will do this.

As I said at the beginning the majority of people do need to worry about these formats just keeping shooting in JPEG as you have always done. I actually shot in RAW format; in my next article I will explain