lossless

"Compression" is a dirty word in the world of photography, but not all compressed files are created equal. That's exactly what photographer Alex Barrera discovered when he switched to using Canon's compressed RAW (cRAW) format exclusively—it's saved him a ton of space, with virtually no downsides.

Apple's recent attempt to invalidate one of RED's most important patents has failed. Earlier this week, a US court dismissed Apple's challenge to RED's main RAW video patent, allowing RED to maintain some control over Apple's ProRes RAW codec.

Oppo is teasing an innovative new smartphone camera system it has created: one that offers a 10x optical "lossless" zoom. The latest reports say the module is already in mass production and the first phone packing it will be out within months.

Every so often, a new image format comes to town and attempts to overthrow the established order of how images (and photos) are saved and shared. In 2010, Google announced a new format called WebP, which promised to speed up the Web by shrinking file sizes without hurting quality. Last year, well-known programmer Fabrice Bellard unveiled a format of his own called BPG that claimed to pack the same quality of JPEGs at just half the size.

Now there's a new contender that raises the bar (and shrinks file size) even more. It's called FLIF, which stands for Free Lossless Image Format.

You’ve spent the last few hours working on the perfect photo shoot and everything went better than you could have possibly imagined. After importing the RAW files to your PC and making a few edits in Photoshop, it is time to save your masterpiece. But, what file type do you select? With over twenty different file types to choose from, we are here to break down some of the most popular and tell you a bit about their strengths and weaknesses.

At the turn of the century, the Joint Photographic Experts Group created what they considered to be the next generation of JPEG image compression. Suitably named JPEG 2000, the standard promised better compression performance with improved image quality. However, despite the standard being released fifteen years ago, why do most photographers only glance over the option when saving in Photoshop? Today, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of a file format that already seems to have become a footnote in history.

The JPEG standard made its debut in 1991 (publicly in 1992), and since then it's become the most widely used lossy compression format for digital images. Now, The Independent JPEG Group at the Leipzig Institute for Applied Informatics -- the folks responsible for defining the standard -- has released an all new version 9.1 of the software library that comes with some powerful new abilities.

It's common knowledge that JPEG compression leads to a loss of data, but it's difficult to really visualize the extent of that loss in a photo. A keen eye will be able to tell a difference, but it's still hard to quantify it.

Tom Scott wanted to bring the reality home to those who don't already understand it. So he took the pitfalls of JPEG compression and transferred them from the world of photos, to the world of Shakespeare.

Recognize the warning message above? It's what Windows XP would show whenever you tried to rotate a JPEG image 90° using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. If you're like me, you probably didn't think twice about it (and checked the checkbox), since you had done it many times already and hadn't noticed any difference in quality. After all, how hard can it be to turn a digital photo sideways? You just move the pixels around right?

Well, not really. The fact of the matter is, JPEG is a "lossy" compression algorithm that's geared towards storing and sharing photos without taking up too much disk space. Rotating these compressed images is usually done by decompressing, rotating, and then re-compressing. Since the re-compression is lossy (i.e. data is thrown away), this process results in slightly degraded photos (hence that warning).