Image compression

What you should know before you start

Everybody who uses a digital camera has been in the position where they want to share or email images with their friends, but need to make the image file size smaller before they do so. What most people are unaware of that there are a variety of ways to do this, and a number of different file formats that can produce different results. Knowing which file formats and file compression methods are best will ensure your photographs stay looking good after you compress them.

JPEG (.jpg)

The JPEG file format has rapidly become the most popular image file for everyday use, and the majority of consumer digital cameras record the pictures they take using this file format. The main benefit of JPEG’s is that they do not require a huge amount of memory space, unlike TIFF files, and sometimes PNG files. They can also be easily compressed to whatever file size you want them to be, although the quality of the picture will be adversely affected. This user friendliness has made them widely used, but the JPEG is not quite as good as it makes out.

One of the little known facts about JPEG’s is the detrimental effect editing and saving the file has. Each time you open the image in Photoshop, Paint, or any other editing software, change it in any way, and then save it again, a reduction in quality occurs. So if you want to alter the colours, adjust the horizon, or add text to the photo, try to do everything the first time round. Editing and saving multiple times will degrade your image and affect its quality.

Another fact to remember is that once a file is compressed there is no going back. If you decide to compress a jpeg at 60% and save it, but then later go back and compress the image again at 80%, it will not be restored to 80% of the original. Instead, it will be just 80% of the 60% compressed file, resulting in additional degradation to the image.

When working with JPEG’s you should try to keep the original high quality file as a backup if any problem occur while you are compressing. Instead of saving the new image over the original, save as a new file instead. That way you can always go back to the unaltered version which hasn’t lost any of its quality.

PNG (.png)

Surprisingly the PNG image file is not used that often, even though it uses lossless compression comparable to TIFF. The resulting file size can be considerably smaller than compressed TIFF’s, and they work fine on websites. The only real drawback with PNG image files is that they aren’t as effective at getting photographs with lots of different colours down to a small file size, JPEG is much better at doing that.

The PNG image file is especially good at compressing images that don’t have many colours. For instance, if you took a high quality picture of your black and white older driver’s insurance policy certificate, and then compressed it using PNG, no quality would be lost but the file size would decrease dramatically. When used for the right type of images, PNG can result in no loss of quality and a good reduction in file size.

TIFF (.tif)

A TIFF image file is a way to store images if you want them to retain 100% of their quality. You can easily convert a JPEG to a TIFF and then back it up to keep as the original to ensure that no quality is lost. Even when you open a TIFF in editing software, make changes, and then save again, no quality is lost. If you do want to play around with your photos using Photoshop or another editing program, a good practice is to convert to TIFF before doing so. Once you are happy with your image, having saved and re-edited as many times as you like, compress the image into a JPEG to whatever file size is required. This will ensure that the quality of the image is reduced only once.

The main disadvantage with TIFF’s is that they are not compatible with website browsers, so you won’t be able to upload TIFF image files to social media or post them on blogs. Instead you will have to convert them to JPEG or PNG.

We strongly recommend however to use PNG instead of TIFF.

We also recommend you ReMage Image Resizer. If you need to resize an image to make it smaller/larger or if you need more space on your computer ReMage Image Resizer is definitely a very usefull tool. It can (batch) resize all images in a folder, literally with one single mouse click and it supports all popular image formats.

Another special program is BioniX Wallpaper Changer. It is not just a wallpaper changer but also an advanced wallpaper manager. BioniX Wallpaper Changer is an easy to use program although it has hundreds of features. This tool also supports all popular image formats.