Camera Terminology: JPEG & TIFF
If you’re like most of us on the photographer side of the camera, you’ve heard the terms JPEG (JPG) and TIFF, but you can’t put into words what they mean. You might be able to respond to an inquiry as to what format your camera saves its images to, JPEG for example, but just what is a JPEG?
JPEG stands for Joint Photo Experts Group and is the most common format for digital images taken by a digital camera (digicam). Some digital SLRs (dSLR) also take photos in TIFF, RAW, or NEF formats. Confused? Keep reading!
DIGITAL FILE SIZE = PIXEL COUNT
Many digicams are rated by the maximum pixel count the camera is capable of producing. The pixel count is directly related to the megapixel size of the digital file corresponding to the image the camera produces. For most consumer digicams, each pixel generates 3 bytes of 8-bit RGB (red, green, blue) data.
Canon PowerShot 12.1MP (Model No: SD780ISR)
This means that a 9MP camera, which has 9 million pixels, generates 27 million bytes of data—that’s 3 bytes per pixel x 9 million pixels = 27MB (megabytes) of data. Some dSLRs can generate extra data (bytes) for additional quality which corresponds to 2 bytes of data for each RGB color—this equates to 16-bit data. By comparison, a 9MP camera which is capable of generating 16-bit data files will produce a 54MB data (image) file.
JEPG
You might be thinking to yourself that a 54MB file is huge and you’d be right. But, these files can be compressed using the JPEG format without a significant drop in quality. JPEGs use a mathematical algorithm designed to work with continuous tone photographic images. Basically, a JPEG decides what colors it can keep and what it can afford to do without. This is accomplished by compressing the RGB data.
As you might expect, the more you compress your image, the more information you lose. It’s just like trying to squeeze an 8×10 photo in a 5×7 frame—you’ll need to cut some of image to get it to fit. However, you can reduce the size of the JPEG by a factor of 10 or so and still get a very high quality image (which should be as good as the uncompressed image for most Internet posting and printing purposes). You can reduce the file size by a factor of 40, or even more, but your image starts to look really bad!
TIFF
If you really want to keep your image without losing any data, you’ve got a good choice in saving your image as a TIFF (Tagged Image File Format). A TIFF keeps all the original information, but at a cost—larger files … much bigger. TIFF images can be compressed in a non-lossy way but they really don’t get much smaller than the original.
THIRD OPTION
Some cameras offer a third option, that of saving the actual data generated by the sensor in a proprietary format—Canon calls their version of this format “RAW” and Nikon calls it “NEF.” These files are compressed but in a non-lossy manner, and are significantly smaller than equivalent TIFF files (but are larger than JPEGs).
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