Joined: Sat Dec 20 2003 Location: Ontario, Canada Posts: 2646
For those of you who are into photography, or just plain digital image editing.
There has been a lot of debate about the degradation of repeated saving of a jpeg file format. Professionals use the RAW format (actually just TIFF) because it doesn't degrade.. However, its well known that jpegs WILL degrade the more the file is edited/saved. Programs like Adobe Photoshop give you various levels of saving quality in jpeg format, from 1 (lowest) to 12 (highest).
I went on a forum hunt today to check into what formats are best, and its really surprising. There are experiments which prove that saving jpegs at level 12 is NOT the best way to go. Using level 8 actually retains the best quality for the longest, with low degradation.
Just thought the digital folk out there might be interested.
Click the pictures to make them bigger and read the captions. The DPReview forums were full of these experiments and the results surprised damn near every photographer and digital editor. Yes, I know, who and how often do you re-save pics, esp 200 times? Doesn't really matter, just the fact that level 8 is better than 12 is very surprising - even after only 50ish saves.
The DPReview is also one of the best review sites I've found to compare digital equipment.