What is the difference between the TIFF and JPEG image formats?
A. TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a flexible standard that it is widely supported by many image processing applications. We use TIFF for black & white images as the TIFF compression algorithm used is best suited to this application. JPEG on the other hand is used for its ability to compress colour image file sizes. JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compression is superior to other formats such as GIF for reproducing full-colour and greyscale images, but JPEG is still a ‘lossy’ form of compression, meaning that parts of the image are discarded in the process of converting it to a JPEG file. Conservative levels of JPEG compression can have negligible impact on the resulting image as far as the human eye is concerned, and still reduce the file to a fraction of its original size. At higher levels of compression however image blurring and ‘artifacts’ can appear, though this is the compromise necessary to achieve very small file sizes.
