Saving Digital Camera Image Files

Once the editing job is finished we have different operations to save the image. The choice of formats depends on the use we are going to give to the photograph. A high resolution image to print on photographic paper or on HQ printer paper must be saved in TIFF format or minimal compression JPEG and maximum quality. The photographic labs accept files in JPEG format for printing, and only some do so for TIFF format, were there is no loss of quality. If our original is destined to the printing press, the standard format is TIFF (preferably without LZW compression) and in CMYK color mode; with Photoshop we can make a version in this color mode of an RGB image ( Image > Mode > Color CMYK ). For images destined to be seen on the monitor or the television we can go with lower resolutions and greater compression in JPEG format. In the case that our image is destined to appear on a web page, Photoshop offers us a complete menu to optimize the relation between size (and quality) of the file and the download time, which is considered essential in this medium. For this we create a new version of the image with the File > Save for web

menu. In this dialog box we can modify almost all the parameters of the image and see the effect in the quality of the image in the download time in different versions of the image. The photographic images of continuous tone are normally saved in JPEG format, and for this we have a menu that combines the size of the new image and the compression degree. The graphs and drawings with flat colors are usually filed in GIF format, whose color mode is indexed color , meaning that the number of tones is reduced to 256 as maximum. GIF is also an ideal file format for nonrectangular shaped images, were the background stays transparent, such as silhouetted images, letters, designs, buttons, etc. In this case the Photoshop document to be saved has to be a layer with an isolated element and no background. An image like this can only be saved in Photoshop format when we use the File > Save menu. Nonetheless, with the save for web menu, we can convert a layer with no background into a GIF file with a transparent background selecting this format and filling in the transparency box in the dialog box. The GIF format lets us choose the number of colors and eliminate the pixels of a determined tone, which becomes specially useful when the transparent image has an unwanted border.