.JPG, .JPEG or TIFF

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.JPG, .JPEG or TIFF?

JPG Most Compatible File Format
JPG (pronounced JAY-peg) is probably the most compatible and popular image file format. It is the format that is going to be able to be viewed by more people now, and, since it is the most popular format, into the future. JPGs can be saved at different quality settings. The lowest settings, such as might be used for WebPages, might have "artifacts" or "pixelization" but we, at Affordable 35mm Slide Scanning, save our JPGs at only the highest settings and you will not get the artifacts or pixelization.

Do JPG Images Degrade Over Time?
No. This is a pretty common misinterpretation. JPG images that are never opened in Photo Editor such as Photoshop and resaved, will never degrade over a million years. It is only in the resaving process that the images are re-compressed and, in the process, the image pixels do degrade just because of the process of compression. In the compression process, some data composing the picture is lost. This is called lossy compression. Watching the images on your DVD player or on your computer will not cause any degradation at all. Over time, disks will eventually degrade. Every few years you should make new copies of yor disks. You should also transfer your images from your disk to some type of hard drive or thumb drive, just as a backup method.

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)

Some people might want to have their images saved in the TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) file format rather than our standard JPG (also known as JPEG) format. That is possible but it will require a much higher cost because of the added time it takes to work such an image in Photoshop, the time it takes to save such a large image, the storage HD space and DVD space that is required for such a large image.

Do You Need JPG or TIFF File Format?

You might want to consider whether or not you really need to have the TIFF images as opposed to our regular JPG image files. A typical TIFF image may be six times, or more, larger than the same JPG file. That mean that we will have to use more disks to store the images on and it will take us more time to write the disks.

TIFF Advantage?

What would be the advantage of getting the TIFF images instead for our regular JPG images? JPG images, if they are opened up in an image editing program, such as Photoshop, and then resaved as a JPG file, once again, have some image information that is lost in the compression process. (It is called lossy compression.) Multiple opening, editing and resaving will decrease the color information in the image. If you are not editing and resaving the images but only viewing them, you are not reducing or losing any of the quality of the image. TIFF images do not give you a higher resolution image than a JPG image. It is the same image but simply saved in a different manner. During that first JPG save, you will not see a noticeable loss of image pixels as compared to TIFF. The JPEG is compressed while a TIFF doesn't have to be compressed.

Save Money And Still Get TIFF

If you want to save yourself some money but still end up with a TIFF image, simply open up your JPG images in an image editor, such as Photoshop, and then resave it as a TIFF. The JPG image will not have degraded to a point where it can even be discerned by any but the most trained person if it was only saved once as a JPG file. Multiple opening, working and then resaving a JPG file will result in a gradual decrease in the quality of an image. And so, if you are going to be doing a lot of work on your JPG images, save them right off the bat as TIFF files and you will prevent image degradation.