If you don't have the advantage of a web designer or an image savvy marketer or a Dave in the office who knows everything these is to know about IT then it can be hard to understand what exactly your photographer is supplying you or what you should be asking for. Weather you are working on printed brochures, website updates or an e commerce site you may like to know a few things about the types of files being provided to you so hopefully this and on going posts will help to shed some light on the RGB, CMYK, JPEG jungle......
#1 File types
More often than not your images will be supplied to you in a digital format and there is a range of file types available which offer various quality, colour saturation and compression. The most commonly used file type is JPEG but its an advantage to know about the others so here it goes.
- TIFF: Large file types that your JPEGS may have originally come from, offers no loss of quality and is not compressed.
- GIF: A compressed file often used in web applications, not great for colour reproduction.
- RAW: This is the biggest file type and is the extension, which is used by most photographers to actually shoot your products or event etc. It maintains very high quality and will need to be compressed in some way to use across media, as RAW files are not viewable without specialist software.
- JPEG: Optimized for photographs and can handle a range of colours and achieve a high quality even though compressed. Accepted by nearly all web programs or print houses.
Short, sweet but a little bit handy! To come....part #2 Colour profiles.
