I have heard that JPEG is a “lossy” format: is it safe to use? Will files saved in any of these formats be accessible in fifty or even ten years given the rate of technological change?
A. First, JPEG. The use of JPEG is a matter of compromise: JPEG allows you to trade in on image quality to acquire a savings in file size, and consequently in disk space and/or bandwidth used. This is especially important for files used on the Internet or for e-mail. If no compromise in image quality is acceptable, setting JPEG to it’s minimum compression / maximum quality level (for example, level 12 in Photoshop), will have no visible effect on image quality but still buy you a significant savings in file size. However, even then, if you repeatedly open, edit, then save an image, you may eventually experience some degradation. Hence the need for lossless formats, such as TIFF and PSD. Also, these formats allow you to preserve images in greater than 8-bit colour depth. However, the big question in a person’s mind when asking this question is whether a file saved in one of these formats will still be accessible after years or decades of elapsed time. My money is on the answer being “ye
A. First, JPEG. The use of JPEG is a matter of compromise: JPEG allows you to trade away some image quality in order to acquire a savings in file size, and consequently in disk space and/or bandwidth used. This is especially important for files used on the Internet or for e-mail. If no compromise in image quality is acceptable, setting JPEG to it’s minimum compression / maximum quality level (for example, level 11 in Photoshop), will have no visible effect on image quality but still buy you a significant savings in file size. However, even then, if you repeatedly open, edit, then save an image, you may eventually experience some degradation. Hence the need for lossless formats, such as TIFF and PSD. Also, these formats allow you to preserve images in greater than 8-bit colour depth. However, the big question in a person’s mind when asking this question is whether a file saved in one of these formats will still be accessible after years or decades of elapsed time. My money is on the ans
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