Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
About JPEGs
Certain file formats are designed to make files as small as possible—and they do that by
throwing out information by the bucketful. These formats are known as
lossy
because they
discard, or lose, some of the file's data every time you save it, to help shrink the file. Some-
times you want that to happen, like when you need a small (and hence, fast-loading) file for a
website. Because of that, many of the file formats that were developed for the Web, most
notably JPEG, favor smallness above all.
NOTE
Formats that preserve all your data are called
lossless
or
non-lossy
. The most popular file
formats for people who are looking to preserve all their photos' data are PSD and TIFF.
If you save a file in JPEG format, then every time you save and close the file, your computer
squishes some of the data out of the photo. What kind of data? The info your computer needs
to display and print the fine details. So you don't want to keep saving your file as a JPEG
over and over again, because every time you do, the image loses a little more detail. You can
usually get away with saving as a JPEG once or twice, but if you keep it up, sooner or later
you'll start to wonder what happened to your beautiful picture.
It's OK that your camera takes photos and saves them as JPEGs—those are typically pretty
enormous JPEGs. Just importing a photo as a JPEG won't hurt the picture, and neither will
opening it to look at it, as long as you don't make any changes. But once you get your files
into Elements, save them as PSD or TIFF files while you work on them. If you want the final
product to be a JPEG, then change the format back to JPEG
after
you're done editing it.
TIP
Your camera may give you several different JPEG compression options to help fit more
pictures on your memory card. Always choose the
least
compression possible. This
makes the files slightly larger, but the quality is much, much better, so it's worth sacrifi-
cing the space.
