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Friday, March 20, 2009

Editing JPEG images - do you lose data?

Q: My digital camera saves photos as JPEGs. Someone told me that JPEGs degrade every time you open them. Is simply viewing my photos really destroying them?

A: I'm afraid you've been misinformed. Your photos won't degrade when you open them. Rather, they degrade every time you edit and save them. The JPEG format uses lossy compression. Compression is used to keep file sizes small; it's common with photo formats. However, some data is discarded when JPEGs are compressed; hence the "lossy" part. And each time you edit and save a JPEG, it is further compressed. That means you lose a little data every time. However, most people won't notice the change




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