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When starting out in photography, a lot of beginners are confused about RAW and JPEG formats while shooting. There are plenty of explanations out there, but with us being photographers, it's easier for us to comprehend a visual reference.

I've had the option of shooting RAW since my Canon 20D over 10 years ago and even though I've never shot JPEG since then, I never actually compared a RAW with JPEG to see the data I would've been losing if I let the camera compress the files itself.

Reuters has implemented a new worldwide policy for freelance photographers that bans photos that were processed from RAW files. Photographers must now only send photos that were originally saved to their cameras as JPEGs.

Heads up: digital rights management (DRM) could be coming to the JPEG image format. That's right... the same kind of controversial technology that's currently being used to protect movie, music, and book copyrights could one day be used to restrict the usage of images, and that proposal has people up in arms.

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.

In this article I will take a look at Google Photos' new photo compression performance. I've been using a program called JPEGmini for a couple years now to compress my JPEG images. Its compression of JPEGs is lossy, but it claims to do so leaving the perceptual image quality virtually unchanged. As far as I can tell, its claims are pretty accurate, and it has literally helped me cut the size of some of my picture folders in half.

Want to understand the math and science behind how JPEG files store your digital photographs? The YouTube channel Computerphile has a new series of videos on the JPEG. They're a bit long and heady, but you may find them interesting if you've ever wondered about the technical details behind one of the world's most popular image compression methods.

Would you say the above photograph has any compression artifacts? Compressed too much, not enough, or just right? What exactly is “just right” anyway. This post will explore the concept of compression, why and how do we do it, and how aggressive we should be in either reducing the file size or increasing the image quality.

JPEG is a remarkably resilient file format. Despite having many upstart formats attempt to dethrone it over the years -- including JPEG 2000 and Google's WebP -- the JPEG is still used by nearly 70% of websites and is holding strong in popularity.

Now there's a new competitor in the ring. It's called BPG (Better Portable Graphics), and it's a format designed and advocated by notable French programmer Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFmpeg and QEMU).

It’s not news that RAW files have a far greater latitude than the same JPEG photographs. However, many beginners only understand this difference on a theoretical level.

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 hardly news that Google+ is doing its damnedest to secure itself as the social network of choice for the photographic community. And the network's ability to handle full-size RAW uploads, in addition to the easy-to-manage system and powerful new in-browser editing tools, in many ways already makes it a shoo-in for that title.

But get ready, because Google isn't done yet. Another update has been pushed Google+'s way, and this time it concerns your RAW photos. Or, more specifically, how good they look when they're automatically converted to JPEGs for viewing.

For some reason, corrupting photos has become something of a thing recently. From the Gliché App for iPhone we shared a few months ago to Doctor Popular's glitched ethereal double exposures, people are trying more and more to turn digital corruption into art.

Well, if you're curious and want to give it a shot yourself, developer Georg Fischer has a quick and easy solution for you.

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.

I have been shooting photographs regularly for over 7 years now. I spent the first year shooting with a 2-megapixel phone camera. Since then, however, I’ve almost always had RAW capable cameras and shot RAW compulsively. And why not? I get 16x or 64x more colour depth than JPEGs. I don’t have to bother about setting the right white balance, contrast or sharpness. I don’t have to choose between monochrome and colour at the time of shooting. I can figure all of that out on the computer during RAW conversion and even try out different settings for the same picture at my leisure. Why would I give up all this and shoot JPEG?

In an attempt to speed up its sizable network and lower costs, Facebook recently decided to begin using Google's WebP image format. The format was designed by Google as a space-saving alternative for PNGs and JPEGs. WebP provides lossless and lossy compression, support for an alpha channel, support for animation and more -- all at much smaller sizes and almost identical image quality.

But all of these advantages come at a price, support for the WebP image format outside of your browser is far from universal. Google set it up as a Web format that, for now, is not supported by any of the major operating systems natively. And so, after the switch, when Facebook users tried to download a funny photo or the vacation pics their friends decided to share through Facebook, they wound up with un-viewable WebP files.

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).

Artist Alan Belcher is known for pioneering a genre of art known as …

Back in August we featured a service called JPEGmini, which gives anybody the ability to shrink their photos up to 5-times in size without any visible quality difference -- a substantial claim, but one that the service seemed to live up to quite well (we use it regularly).

While looking into the new compression service JPEGmini yesterday, the following statement caught my eye in an interview they did with Megapixel:

[...] sometimes you increase the quality setting in Photoshop and the actual quality of the image is reduced...

I had never heard of that before, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

JPEGmini is a new image compression service that can magically reduce the file size of your JPEG photos by up to 5 times without any visible loss in quality. ICVT, the Israeli company behind the service, explains how the technology works in an interview with Megapixel:

Our technology analyzes each specific photo, and determines the maximum amount of compression that can be applied to the photo without creating any visual artifacts. In this way, the system compresses each photo to the maximum extent possible without hurting the perceived quality of the photo.

You can test out the technology on your own photos through the service's website.

One of huge benefits of shooting in RAW is that RAW files usually have considerably more dynamic range than a JPG. This means that details in the shadows and highlights of an image that would otherwise be lost if shooting JPG are stored in the RAW file, and able to be recovered if needed during post-processing.

Google unveiled a new image format today called WebP that it hopes will make the web faster by cutting files sizes of images without affecting quality. According to a blog post they published earlier today, photos and images account for 65% of the bytes transmitted by websites. In their tests done using 1 million randomly selected images from the web, re-encoding images as WebP resulted in an average file size reduction of 39%. Here's a gallery with image and file size comparisons.

Most of you probably know that JPEG is lossy compression method, meaning compression permanently throws out data and detail. Luckily, a typical compression can save 10 times the space of an uncompressed image without sacrificing much noticeable quality. However, if the image is repeatedly compressed and saved, artifacts introduced during compression become more and more obvious.

Here’s a photograph I randomly snapped on a tennis court a few days ago: It was taken with my …