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I bought my first digital camera in 1999. It was a two megapixel Olympus that recorded onto the now defunct yet surprisingly slim SmartMedia cards. Being some 26 years ago, my memory is a little hazy but as I recall, it shot jpeg and tiff file formats.
The tiff format was significantly larger and with the SmartMedia card I owned, I couldn’t save much more than about 8 shots. So, jpeg became my image format of choice, along with most other adopters of digital photography.
Roll on 26 years, and we still have predominantly two image file formats on our cameras, jpeg and raw. Raw has pretty much replaced tiff due to its much greater latitudes to editing. However, jpeg remains a file format developed long before the advent of digital cameras.
Things, however, are changing and is often the case these days, it’s being driven by smartphones. So today we are going to try and make sense of the current image file formats, hopefully allowing you an informed view on which one to use in your photography.
Jpeg – The Grand Daddy Of Formats.
We all know jpeg. It’s been around longer than many of us have been taking photos. But why has it been so enduring? The simple answer is file size. Jpeg, being a compressed format, enables not only many more images to be recorded to a card, but for them to be recorded quicker.
The computing power in modern cameras, combined with the size of memory cards means this is not a major consideration these days. However, for the first, perhaps, two decades of digital photography, speed and space were very much technical barriers. So the jpeg endured.
Even today it has plenty of uses. Much of the image data, white balance, saturation, contrast, etc., is baked into the file, meaning it requires much less editing.
Its small file size still gives advantages today when shooting large number of shots, very quickly, such as in sports or wildlife photography. Jpeg is not going away anytime soon. Or is it?
HEIC – The New Kid On The Block
As mentioned earlier, smartphones have driven a lot of recent photographic technology. However, being multi purpose devices, their processors are not dedicated entirely to photography. They also have limited internal space and are capable of “on the fly” computational photography. All this adds up to needing a very small, very “fast to write” file format.
Enter, HEIC or HEIF, High Efficiency Image Container or Format. Developed by Apple and some Android manufactures, it has fast become a staple of smartphone photography. However, it is now making its way onto more mainstream, mirrorless cameras as an alternative to jpeg.
The main thing that has been holding the format back has been software. Being Apple developed, Macs have been able to deal with the format since the beginning, however, Windows has only recently started to support the file natively. All this added up to a relative lack of editing software to process these files. That, however, is changing fast and I suspect we will soon see cameras replacing Jpeg with HEIC rather than supplementing it.
Like jpeg, however image data, including computational photography data is backed in. This means it is not as editable as a RAW file. Speaking of which..
RAW – The Digital Negative.
I can’t remember exactly when raw first started to make an appearance in digital photography but I suspect it was the early 2000s. It was a dramatic entrance, more a subtle realisation that there was a format that allowed us a lot of editing leeway and to change white balance in post production.
It was not without some major issues though. These days we simply drop a RAW into Lightroom and get to work. In the early days however, you needed dedicated RAW editing software, making for a complicated and expensive workflow.
Today however, raw is the gold standard. It is by far the most malleable file format, yielding the highest image quality. Technically raw is actually many different file formats, each camera manufacturer has a raw format, and individual camera models can have variations on that raw format. Adobe even has its own raw, dng, which allows for you to convert your OEM Raw file into an all encompassing, generic raw.
It’s not without issues though. It’s a much larger file size than jpeg and HEIC and straight out of the camera the images are very flat and unsaturated. They are, in effect, digital negatives that require you to work on them to get the best results.
Raw files can also come in uncompressed, lossless compressed and compressed formats, adding to the confusion. Unless space is at an absolute premium, uncompressed is the way to go.
Early adopters of new cameras can also come up against issues, where Mac/Windows or editing software developers have not had time to add the new raw file to their systems, leaving photographers without a way to edit their raw files.
However, it is probably safe to say that raw, in its many different forms will be the de facto format for the years ahead.
Future Formats
Whilst jpeg persists and raw reigns, camera companies and phone developers are not standing still. There will be new formats in the future, some of which we are beginning to see now.
Apple’s ProRaw is a relatively recent file format, which on the face of it is a vanilla raw file. However, it is actually a combination of raw and HEIC. This allows for some of the editing leeway of a RAW file whilst incorporating the ability to use computational photography at the time of taking.
The jpeg file format has also gone through a re-imagining in the form of jpeg XL. This is a new variation of the format, that offers higher compression, smaller file sizes but with a much improved image quality. In its lowest compression it offers lossless image visual image quality.
Beyond cameras there are also new image file formats designed for displaying images online but give a much better quality than jpeg or png.
Like VHS/Betamax there will probably only be one dominant compressed file format, whether that is HEIC or jpeg XL remains to be seen.
For now, though, your main choice on mainstream cameras is jpeg or raw. Raw will give you more editing ability, and better image quality. Jpeg will allow you to shoot faster and edit less.
Any new future formats will probably still fall broadly into those same two categories, it will always be quality vs convenience.
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