Re: Question re jpeg compression

David J Taylor wrote:
Peter in New Zealand wrote:
[]
If anyone has any thoughts as to why converting and storing in png
format might not be such a bright idea (apart from the size issue) I
would appreciate your comments. I feel such a beginner with all this,
and the knowledge and experience of many others in this group is quite
self evident. My grateful thanks.

Peter,

Unless you have the uncompressed originals (i.e. not compressed JPEGs), you will gain nothing by saving what you already have in PNG format. The JPEG loss has already happened. Next time you scan or take a photo, you can ensure it's lossless, and save /that/ in PNG if you wish.

Actually, I find that a low-compression JPEG is actually good enough for me. I don't have time to mess with processing "RAW" format images, and I believe in getting the exposure correct in the camera at the time of taking (if possible) rather than fixing it later in post-processing. Perhaps that what comes from decades of taking slides!

Cheers,
David


Thank you David. I might be getting just a little narrow minded on this one. Maybe I need to step back a little and get a more relaxed point of view. If I understand what you are saying it means that, because my little camera *only* saves in jpeg format, there's not too much point in converting once they are on the computer. In fact I used jpeg quite happily for about four years until I learnt about the issue of lossy compression. Maybe it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing (smile).

Being a type A personality I tend to be a fiddler, and I find it hard to leave something alone when it's not yet perfect, but *good enough* for its intended purpose. I'll just trundle on with jpeg for now, and keep the issue in the back of my mind so I don't go mad on the hack and save business. I absolutely agree with you that it's best to get it as right as possible in the camera, and so minimise post shooting processing. This is a bad habit I picked up years ago when I had my own darkroom. I would take multiple shots of a subject, shortlist them from the negs, and then settle on just one, which I would spend hours and hours on until I had it just as I liked. Trouble is it tends to make one lazy when shooting I think. Just blast off heaps on the understanding that at least one will be in there somewhere that does what you want.

I should try to be more like Cartier Bresson who pioneered the concept of the decisive moment in a scene. He became almost psychic in his ability to anticipate it and hit the shutter release on his ancient and (to us) primitive equipment.

Now I am rambling - please forgive me, and once again, thank you David for your valuable comments.

--
Peter in New Zealand. (Email address is fake)
Collector of old cameras, tropical fish fancier, good coffee nutter, and compulsive computer fiddler.
.

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