Ever since I was little, I was secretly obsessed with all the different file formats and what they did. I only really knew JPG, PNG, and maybe GIF. I remember driving somewhere, and my dad was explaining as best he could what each one was used for. THIS VIDEO FLOODS ALL TEH MEMORIES
images will contain areas where you can see through the image to whatever is behind it. say, if you layer an image on top of another image, any transparent areas allow you to see the image behind it. GIF had hard transparency, where a pixel is either fully opaque or fully transparent. PNG allows variable transparency, so things can fade out or have soft edges or similar, or only partly blend over something (for example, like a piece of colored glass, or some mist effects, ...).
PNG compression preserves all colour, there is literally no loss in quality. If you compare the image from within photoshop, to PNG and JPG exports, the PNG will always be indistinguishable whereas the JPG will not.
I agree that RAWs are great for serious photo projects. But they just take up so much space and add an extra processing step that for casual stuff, I just go straight to JPG.
This was all very informative but I just wanted to mention that in my own experience I've started saving more and more still images as png specifically because I noticed I could get a bigger image than a jpeg with a WAY smaller file size. I used to not use them because my image viewer didn't understand them so when I double clicked one to look at the image it would try to open a browser. Now that pngs are supported by image viewers it's my favorite file type.
FYI, the reason for .tif/.tiff and .jpg/.jpeg has to do with the saving format. Many older formats of drives only allowed three letter file extensions due to a naming convention called 8.3, and the .tif and .jpg were born. Most modern disk formats allow longer file extensions, and therefore .tiff and .jpeg is once again allowed.
It makes me so sad how most of the discourse about this video is about the pronunciation of GIF, when there is an awesome, incredible, educational video that offers so many more interesting discussions.
ZIP does general loss-less compression. It is indistinguishable from the original. As ZIP doesn't know anything about images, it wouldn't know what to throw away so that is still looks good.
Brandi - I was Lightroom skeptical at first, but it really is a lifesaver for photographers. It's helps immensely with organization and is the quickest for editing a large batch of photos. As far as your channel art, you'll have better luck with. png. The graininess often happens after RU-vid processes and compresses the .jpg image.
additional side note: also, when MS created the hack for long-file names, they also got a patent on it (sort-of...). later on, FAT32 got popular in consumer electronics (due to being relatively simple, and also readable by Windows, Mac, Linux, ...). however, due to this patent, and people not wanting to pay license fees for it, a lot of consumer electronics stayed with only supporting 8.3 names. the partial result of this is filenames like 'DSC#####.JPG' and similar for many digital cameras.
I would like to add something that I have noticed while scanning documents. I normally use JPG and PNG. JPG has better compression for colored pictures, but PNG seems to give better results with smaller file size when the image is only in black and white.
In regards to TIFFs vs JPEGs, TIFFS handle high contrasting, geometric shapes better than JPEGs. Such as text, and images with "blocky" components (like logos). JPEGs handle and compress gradients and transitions better like a picture of a sunset for example.
side note: there is also an "Adobe JPEG" format which can (at least theoretically) be made lossless, but is not technically a JFIF JPEG, and sometimes has compatibility issues with other software. (apparently they later dropped it though, and AFAICT it still didn't have transparency support). (also, they used raw RGB or CMYK which makes for big files...). so, yeah, mostly it is an issue with the specifics of JFIF, rather than JPEG itself, but most software around assumes JFIF. so, alas...
In general PNG looks nicer for drawings/images with less color (like a GIF) but from personal experience I've noticed color loss when saving a very colorful image in PNG. If your image has a lot of bright, saturated colors, they will look dull as a PNG vs. a JPG. In general, JPG is a better way to go if you want to maintain accurate colors in a photo. I'd choose PDF and high quality JPG for printing over PNG
yep. I mostly use PNG for working on stuff as well, except when I need layers, then it is a decision between PDN (Paint.NET), XCF (GIMP), ORA (OpenRaster) or my own BTJ format (used by my own code, and as a Paint.NET plugin). (where BTJ is a hacked version of JPEG with with lossless encoding, an alpha channel, layers support, and a few other obscure things hacked on, but it is a non-standard format...). usually it mostly comes down to what I am doing with the file.
i'm not completely sure about this, but i think the JPG/JPEG difference is because some computers don't recognise four-letter filename extensions, so it's shortened to JPG on those computers.
Nicely explained, but I would say when it comes to web, more often than not PNG (or GIF) would be a better choice. Sure photos, drawings and such would benefit from the compression of JPEG, but icons, graphics, web design elements and everything with typography in it, transparent or not, is worth the marginally larger file size. With today's connection speeds, it doesn't matter that much, and the difference isn't that big, unless you opt for really low quality.
'm personally a huge fan of RAW images, yes I do work on photos from my DSLR, the range of edit iis rather amazing, it's also gotten me into RAW video which I haven't gotten into first hand yet. great video thanks :D
Oh I'm not sure about images that are being shrunk down by an additional factor. At that point you just kind of have to experiment to see what looks the best for your design.
sort of... when long filenames came around, the same underlying filesystems ("disk format") were still in use (namely FAT12 / FAT16, also FAT32), just with a few tweaks (clever hacks) to support the longer names (supported by Win95 and newer). MS-DOS could still access the drives, it would just not see the longer names, but instead a truncated short name, and likewise, older disks could still be used, and would handle long filenames (without a reformat or similar...).
lossless isn't really directly possible in the standard JFIF JPEG format, due mostly to a few assumptions that were made early on (storing color at a lower resolution, the commonly used YCbCr colorspace, ...). however, it is possible to handle JPEGs losslessly with specialized loading/saving code (such as via application plugins), but this is fairly uncommon. actually, it is like transparency in JPEG: technically possible, but no one can really agree on the specifics, and app support is rare.
I have never heard of eps, but I knew about the rest. That might make it easier for me to share logos and fliers made in illustrator, so thanks for the tip!
some apps (my stuff, also newer versions of libjpeg, ...) do support some extensions for lossless JPEG images and transparency or similar. if opened in existing apps, the extra data is ignored (so we see a lossy version with transparent areas as cyan or magenta or similar), but this isn't really useful for general users without application support (such as from MS/Adobe/...). there is also JPEG-XR (AKA: HD Photo), which has more widespread app support (bit is a different format though).
Love it, thank you! Now, instead of trying to explain all this to clients who likely may not grasp it anyway, I will just send them the link to your video, lol. Saves me a lot of time.
can you do a tutorial in photoshop for whatever you think we are having problems? I would definitely watch because I do value your opinion and knowledge.
I've used and learned what they are called but you make it sound clearer you should do another video so I could learn something new because their are always new ones
clarification: yep, as-in, I use PNGs. JPEGs are still lossy (in their natural form), so will still tend to lose quality for each load/save cycle... (this is mostly due to various factors, ranging from the DCT transform to the internal colorspace conversions, ... at 100% quality, mostly it is due to things like internal number-rounding and similar...).
yeah, MNG is rare... there is also APNG, which at present has a little better browser support... another (very obscure) format is "M-PNG" (Motion PNG), which is basically PNG frames inside of an AVI container. there is also M-JPEG (Motion-JPEG), which is a little more common (than M-PNG), typically JPEG frames inside an AVI or MOV container (sometimes used by digital cameras to record video, vs MPEG 1/2/4). (aside: some of my own software uses tweaked M-JPEG AVIs for short animations...).
I love your videos so much Karen! This is the sort of stuff I just love to sit and get lost in google finding out information about. You save the effort so I can just sit and watch! haha
I'm surprised you don't cover more Gimp and Inkscape related stuff. These are great programs for people who want to work on some digital images but can't afford Adobe products or just prefer to stick to (F)OSS.
partly, and it is sort of a convention to only use 3 letter extensions on Windows. originally, this was a limit of the OS in DOS and Win 3.x days, as well as some other early OS'es... partly 8.3 filenames were a legacy of early OS'es on PDP minicomputers and similar, which later CP/M and DOS copied, and the 3 letter file extensions are sort of a lingering detail of this... other than the file extension, JPG and JPEG are the same...
Can you talk about T-Shirt printing. Because i have a design that has a transparent background but a lot of T-shirt printers dont accept transparent backgrounds they only accept solid colors. How should i set up the file for T-shirt printing. so that i dont have to have a background color? If you need me to explain more i can put up a video response. I think this would be a really good topic.
Will you please make a video on the importance of specs on a PC and/or MAC when it come to supporting multiple programs and design stuff and all that jazz, lol. THANK YOU in advance. Programming student!
My specific example would be that if I were making a 100px icon and needed it to be a small file size (as icon uploads often have file size limits) but still a decent dpi so that it didn't get all grainy, that a png was more successful at this than a jpeg. Am I using png for bigger images under a false assumption that this quality to file size ratio is the same as it was with the tiny icon image? Please let me know.
Could you tell me the best way to save a picture downloaded from phone to be put behind a clipping mask square of color in illustrator? It's rust from a van and I liked the effect it gave when I made the transparency of the sq color low but I'm afraid if the design gets blown up, it will not look the same. I tried to make the same effect with a paint brush on ai but it didn't really work. Too neat. Thank you:)
For smaller things like family vacations, road trips, birthday parties, etc. I have my camera set to JPG only, however for actual photography session and artsy fartsy stuff I have it set to RAWs and JPGs. I'm saving money to get Adobe Lightroom (I have heard it is an amazing lifesaver for photographers) and was wondering if you have used it? For now I do all my pro editing in Ps. I actually DO have a question - I used a JPEG for my channel art and it looks grainy to me... why is that?
What do you mean by transparency in these contexts? Also, recently I sent pdf's as attachments to an email and they were converted to winmail.dat format... obviously this was inconvenient and I didn't know what to do with the winmail.dat's... Help please!
I don't think this was covered, but how do you save a .JP(E)G with lossless compression vs. lossy? Also, I seriously just looked up the difference between .EPS and .AI the other day because I didn't know! If only I could have been more patient and just waited a couple more days then I would have gotten my answer from the almighty Karen!
If you make homemade stickers do you save them as a png so I can put it in my Cricut maker I’m trying to learn how I can make my drawings and turn them into stickers.
Thanks for the video! I have a question please. I am writing a book that i would like but on kindle however I am not sure what file type i need to get from the editor he sent over a jpeg but do i need to get it in to a vector or it a jpeg a vector file? Can any one please help? Thank you !
Jpegs, look better than pngs? I use pngs all the time, because they are smaller than tiffs, but they are still lossless compression. And I always have the option of including transparency which I use in video, or a t-shirt design, but I always use pngs just because I find myself making a small jpg for web and wanting to print it larger... later... and on a t-shirt. and in a video. So I just start high quality with png
Question: I once made a quick sketch of something in MS paint just to show a friend what I was talking about. I saved it as a jpg and noticed when I re-opened it (the first time) that the colors were way off. Said friend told me that png was better at preserving colors accurately, so I re-drew & re-saved it, and he was right. But that appears to be contrary to what you said about those formats. Am I misunderstanding something? PS I say "ping", but that's just me. :-)
Ok.. I am doing biology, but I'm gonna tell a secret... I Just LOVE graphic design, and animation and typography and on and on.... but I'm kinda, lost on this world =( so, thank you a lot for your information, you've just made a new friend =D btw... LOVE this room
I'm surprised you say that JPG is preferred over PNG for quality. JPG is Lossy and PNG is lossless (it's actually the best compression/smallest file size that is still lossless, though slightly larger than JPG). Also PNG has a secret sister called MNG which is the same technology but supports animation. It was meant to beat GIF on the web by being lossless and full-color but never really caught on. Finally, SVG's are vector-based files that almost every program (including browsers) can read.
There is no diffrence between .TIF and .TIFF or .JPG and .JPEG it's just like this because older filesystems requred that file extentions had a . followed three alphanumeric letters but this is not used in any current operating system any more to the best of my knowledge. But I remember a time where it was important to always use .TIF and .JPG to avoid problems with other systems
I want to save a digital drawing so i can upload it as a pic to art amino and/or send it to someone on the email. What form do i choose? Much rather it be a lossless file.
hey great video! My friend took some photos of me on His Nikon camera and the file format is NEF, i use picmonkey to edit but whenever i upload to Facebook they go super blurry! Any advice would be very much appreciated!! :)
I have always wondered these things and yet I've never bothered to ask my brother who studied graphic design in college. I'm obviously not tapping into my resources well enough.
