JPEG is now lossless
JPEG is the most popular format to store photos but has one major drawback — it degrades the image upon every save. This forces high-end photos to be saved in RAW or TIFF formats, which are both lossless but require much larger file sizes. Today that changes, as JPEG version 9a has debuted with a valuable option — lossless compression.
The updated format also supports more detailed colors (from 8- to 12-bit color depth), more scaling functions, and other compression options.
New features of JPEG 9a:
- Add support for wide gamut color spaces (JFIF version 2).Improve clarity and accuracy in color conversion modules.
- Extend the bit depth support to all values from 8 to 12
- Enable option to use default Huffman tables for lossless compression(for hardware solution), and in this case improve lossless RGB compressionwith reversible color transform
— Independent JPEG Group
Sources: Press release on photoscala. Image credit: Wikipedia.
Next page: Get paid to learn wedding photography