On Digital.

It's hard to think these days, with everything being digital, that photography in its digital form is still in competition with manual and analogue formats. Quality is merely a concept when it comes to photography and depends greatly, in my opinion, on the context of the photograph and its treatment.

Post processing has always been and always will be a tedious and precise task, and has only changed in complexity when it comes to digital processing. Taking digital images is far easier than taking analogue pictures , but editing a digital image is very different to editing film.

In the digital process we have a wide assortment of tools delivered through platforms as Programs, this may be an adobe product or something similar. These allow us to manipulate the data that is stored in our digital images, but how much data is relevant to the file type.

When an image is taken in JPEG settings on a DSLR, a raw image is in fact taken and then compressed into a jpeg.

This type of conversion is one of two types, the first being lossless compression in which the image is compressed into a ZIP folder where the contents is inaccessible until the folder is UNZIPPED or uncompressed and opened (This process is usually done outside of an editing program to a RAW file). The Second type is lossy, in this process data is discarded throughout the image and can be scaled as to how much and what specific data is lost resulting in a mediocre-decent quality image. It is also important to note that repeated saving of a JPEG will infinitely discard information.

In .JPEG file formats, a lot of data is lost due to the amount of compression as is relative to how much it is compressed; eg. JPEG with a compression factor of 10 would look 5 times better than the same JPEG with a compression rate of 50.

low quality and resolution JPEG

The picture above is a low quality JPEG that could be arguably have been compressed beyond compression factor 50. This is evident in the square, compression related Artefacts. These are a direct result of compression, to reduce file size the pixels have been cut into bigger square segments and the detail in between has been blurred. these artefacts are smaller and less frequent in images of a higher quality nature.

Highest quality JPEG

Above is a higher quality image file. Raw image files consist of not a picture, but every detail that was recorded by the camera to produce that image. These details make up the Metadata and are unique to RAW files.

With these file types you can theoretically adjust any aspect of the data you like, for example you could decrease shadow intensity whilst lowering the colour saturation or even fix lens distortions. Also, something to note on RAW's, is the lack of compression -- file sizes and resolutions will be uncompressed and very large. You can see that there are no artefacts in this image but not because it has not been compressed at all and because it is a RAW file, but because it is a high quality JPEG as RAW files can't generally be viewed or inserted onto websites and as a result, has limited me to posting instead this High quality Jpeg to use as an example.

Using high quality JPEG is a good compromise, whilst the image is compressed for size, it retains a relatively high level of detail whilst being compatible with most platforms; but zooming in on the image beyond a certain threshold will begin to show compression artefacts regardless.

References:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/

https://www.slrlounge.com/