File Formats Blog

Digital cameras, especially the cheaper ones, often give you images only in JPEG format. This is less than ideal, since JPEG is a lossy format, and editing the image may result in further loss and digital artifacts. For serious work, a lossless image format is preferable. Two alternatives have been shaping up: lossless JPEG 2000 and Adobe's DNG (which is actually a TIFF format with additional tags).

JPEG 2000 came first and has the advantage of not being tied to a single vendor, and the standard has a wide variety of applications. However, it has been adopted slowly so far; if the JPX extensions are included, it's a very complicated format to implement completely. DNG belongs to Adobe Systems, but is based on the widely-implemented TIFF format (specifically, on TIFF-EP). Certainly either one is preferable to vendor-specific raw file formats.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 8:43 PM