CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS JPEG For (Web hosting domain names)
CHAPTER 2 IMPROVING DIGITAL PHOTOS JPEG For sharing full-color photographs, the best format to use is usually JPEG. Pronounced jay-peg, the name comes from the group that defined the format, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Usually, a JPEG file will have an extension of .jpg . JPEG images are highly compressed and are encoded in full color, so it s a very efficient format for photographs or other images with a wide range of colors. The drawback to this format is that the compression is lossy. That means that every time you read a JPEG file, make a change (however minor), and write the file back to disk, the image quality degrades slightly. Don t use JPEG for images you plan to edit over and over. But as a for mat for exchanging photographs with other people, JPEG excels. (There s no quality loss when you copy the file from one place to another, only when you edit it and write it back to disk.) You may be wondering, My camera stores images as JPEGs. Does that mean I m losing quality? The answer is yes. That s why many cameras provide a non-lossy raw format (discussed in the section, Other Formats ) as well as JPEG. However, JPEG files are so much smaller that you can store many, many more images than is possible with raw mode on the same memory card. Use raw format if you re worried about it, or if you re bothered by the image quality of a JPEG; but for most people, the slight quality loss caused by using JPEG on a camera, plus editing an image once or twice and saving it again in JPEG format, will not be noticed. The space savings are worth it. GIF The Graphics Interchange Format, pronounced giff with a hard g as in graphics, is an indexed format. This means that it uses a fixed list of colors instead of encoding every color separately. This is very efficient for images with a small number of colors, like a five-color corporate logo. GIF can represent up to 256 colors (256 is 2 to the 8th power, so this is also called 8-bit color). Typical photographs have many more colors than that, so saving a photograph in GIF format will usually result in very poor quality. Even worse, with 256 colors, the file will usually be larger than a full-color JPEG version of the same image! The lesson is clear: don t use GIF for photographs, only for simple icons and logos. The GIF format offers two very useful features: transparency and animation. With trans parency, you can make an icon with a clear background. If you display it on a web page, or on a button in a program s user interface, whatever s behind the icon (even if it s another image) will show through. GIF doesn t allow for partial transparency; a pixel is either fully transparent or not transparent at all. GIF animation allows you to create images that move. Most web browsers support animated GIF images. (Whether this is a good idea is unclear; some users dislike animated images on web pages, and will avoid websites that use them. But they have their uses.) To learn how to create GIF animation, see Making Simple GIF Animations in Chapter 3.
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