Formats not for wiping your feet on.

It seems that these days every company that produces software creates their very own file format and sometimes it's impossible to know which program would best open a format or which program could possibly convert it for you. I'm gonna talk about some graphics formats, because well I like graphics and those are the formats I use most often. Lets start with jpg, a jpg is compressed image file. Most photo editing and viewing programs will open them, but be careful when your saving a jpg. If you do a save as and save it as a jpg you could end up compressing it again and then you have a jpg that been compressed twice. We call jpg's lossy, because every time you save them as jpg's they loose some quality. Oh it's not so much that your eye will be able to tell right away, but save it enough times and you'll notice a big loss in quality. So how do we keep good quality image files? Well that brings me to the next format the TIFF or TIF. Tiff can be uncompressed which means we lose no quality, but the trade of is the size on the file. Tiff's are generally really big files. But if your only worried about quality and plan on printing your photos to paper then Tiff might be the best option. Tiff can use a compression but most times when I save things as Tiff I choose not to compress them. This is because I use tiffs when I want the best quality and I want it to stay that way. Alright lets move to PDF. PDF means portable document file, which means that it takes what ever information the original file was and compresses it. Oh, there's that compress word again, well don't worry about it this time. The nice thing about a PDF is that even those it's compressed all that compressed info is still with the file, so you could open a PDF photo or graphic is a photo editing software like photoshop and it would still be at the original quality you started with. PDF's are best for sending things over the web through email. Not only do they keep your file compressed but they let you see what the graphic is. I recommend photoshop when converting PDF's to JPG's or Tiffs. Ok lets move on.

PNG's, a png is a graphic format that saves transparency information. This come in real handy when you have transparent parts of your graphics. They also are perfect for getting your images ready for the web, whether they have transparency or not. Most often when your preparing images for your website or the upload them and you want great quality but small file size png is the way to go. I personally always use this format when I upload photos.



Now all these formats are creatable from Photoshop and other graphics editing programs and each has it's uses. Be mindful of what your needs are for your graphics and you'll be able to get the most out of your photos.