At a loss between lossy and lossless?

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Rudi
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At a loss between lossy and lossless?

Post by Rudi »

Whether you’re dealing with images, music, or video files, it’s important to understand the difference between different types of formats and when to use them. Using the wrong format could ruin a file’s quality or make its file size unnecessarily large.

Some types of media file formats are “lossy” and some types are “lossless.” We’ll explain what these terms mean, the advantages of each type of file format, and why you should never convert lossy formats to lossless ones.

A good How-To geek article on the topic...
Lossless vs. Lossy.jpg
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Rudi

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HansV
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Re: At a loss between lossy and lossless?

Post by HansV »

I kept on reading "lousy" instead of "lossy"...

Useful article, by the way.
Best wishes,
Hans

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BobH
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Re: At a loss between lossy and lossless?

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:thumbup:
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stuck
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Re: At a loss between lossy and lossless?

Post by stuck »

Rudi wrote:...A good How-To geek article on the topic...
The pedant in me wants to take issue with their comments about RAW files but I'll restrain myself :hushmouth:

Ken
PS shouldn't this thread be in graphic apps?

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HansV
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Re: At a loss between lossy and lossless?

Post by HansV »

stuck wrote:PS shouldn't this thread be in graphic apps?
Good point - consider it done!
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Hans

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Rudi
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Re: At a loss between lossy and lossless?

Post by Rudi »

I considered that forum, but decided to put it in Scuttlebutt as it was not discussing "software" or any graphic application. It was just a open discussion on a picture file formats. Anyways...its location can be set as the Admins deem fit.
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Rudi

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stuck
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Re: At a loss between lossy and lossless?

Post by stuck »

OK, to give it more weight for being here rather than Scuttlebutt I will say something about RAW formats after all.
If we’re just uploading these files to a social network or placing them on a website, we don’t want these image files to take up so much space. A photo gallery with RAW images could take up hundreds of megabytes of space. RAW formats may be used by professional photographers to keep image quality high during the editing process, but they’re not intended for the average person.
Never mind the file size considerations on sharing a RAW file, the main reason for not sharing one is that a RAW file is not an image file. A RAW file is just the data off the sensor so a photo gallery of RAW files on any platform would not allow the viewer to see anything. In order to 'see' the image the RAW data represents it must first be processed/converted into an image file format (jpg, tiff, etc.).

The way a RAW file is coded is proprietary to the camera manufacturer so each camera manufacturer has their own RAW processing software that will handle their particular RAW format or but there are numerous other software applications, both paid and free, that can cope with most if not all types of RAW files.

Professional and average people do not "use RAW files to keep image quality high during editing" but because they want to be in control of the RAW to image file conversion process.

Ken