JPEG VS TIFF VS RAW
Which format should you shoot in? More choice means more decisions

It was simpler in the good old film days. You chose the film of your choice according to what you liked shooting and how you wanted it to come out. If you shot outdoors and liked saturated colours you'd choose Fuji Velvia, or Sensia for low contrast and more tones in the studio. There was the absolute classic Kodak Tri-X for that deliciously grainy reportage black and white feel and it was so forgiving you could push it to perform in almost any light condition. You'd use transparency or slides for more contrast and depth, or negatives for direct printing and more exposure latitude.

Now though, you just have menus. Choose your white balance, ISO speed, saturation levels, contrast and even in-house sharpening. They're all available at the flick of a button on most digital cameras, and on every digital SLR. And then of course there's that final click that will decide which format your photograph is saved in. Three basic choices – JPEG, TIFF and RAW – don't seem like much, but in them lies the decision that will affect everything from editing power to print quality to archival possibility. It’s not the technology that’s lacking now, but your knowledge about it.

RAW: the mother source
RAW is barely even a file format, and, as its name implies, is the raw data that your camera captures before processing it. Usually, with a digital SLR, you'd shoot in RAW and then convert these files into another format that is recognisable as one, like TIFF or JPEG.

So lets say your camera could store your photos as RAW, and then you'd download them and convert them, so they remain RAW on your computer for only the amount of time it takes to turn them into a file format like TIFF or JPEG. Which makes the process a little silly, but RAW is rescued from the trash by people who value it for its virgin, unprocessed data.

Instead of letting their cameras automatically apply adjustments to the file while converting it into another format, they prefer to do it on their own, opening the RAW file, working on it and then saving it to a TIFF, perhaps. You can't really change exposure after a raw file is shot, although the software that opens this data gives one the option to rescale the data and give the impression of changing exposure. Only RAW allows some ability to correct overexposure.

TIFF: big information and bigger files
While some cameras might be able to save directly to TIFF, you can't usually do this, so you'd need to shoot in RAW and then convert these files into TIFF on your computer. TIFF holds all the information you need, even for printing, so can easily call itself the standard for the publishing industry. Its sole disadvantage is that it produces mammoth file sizes, which take more computer processing power to open and edit, and large storage capacities to hold. That said, computer clock speeds, RAM and external hard disks are cheap compared to what they were just a year ago, and infinitely more affordable than losing your data.

The many problems of RAW
The biggest problem of RAW is that since it is barely a file format it has no standard that is universally recognised. So if you shoot Nikon's version you would have to open it and convert it using not just Nikon's software (like Nikon Capture) but the updated version of software (like Capture 4) that is compatible with the current version of Nikon's RAW, which they insist on complicating even more by calling NEF. So if you're shooting Nikon but are away from your computer and don't have access to their software, good luck to you. This also applies to other camera makers and their versions of RAW.

That brings you to your second problem with RAW: if it is so incompatible today, how do you think you could work with your current RAW files tomorrow? Imagine archiving your photographs in a half format that you can't open in the future.

RAW files are also large (though not as large as TIFF) and will limit the number of shots that your camera storage card can hold. They also take longer to process, which means that you could shoot more frames per second if you were shooting in JPEG. Many sports photojournalists prefer lighter file sizes and faster shutter bursts.

JPEG: the humble trump card
JPEGs are the great saviours of the amateur photographic community across the world, and could be the only completely universally recognised photographic file format that exists. You could safely bet that anyone anywhere in the world could open your JPEG image. JPEG files are also light, take up less disk space and are suitable for transfer over the Internet, as emailed attachments for example. For non professionals, they're the closest thing to perfection: shoot in them and once you transfer the files to your computer they're ready for printing or sharing.

Compression and perception
Advanced amateurs – that breed of people who invest more time and effort in the pursuit of equipment rather than actually creating photographs – regard JPEG as a shame that they would not want to be associated with. It has been too easily digested by the masses to be taken seriously, and they'd rather tinker around with RAW, which is cumbersome enough to get thought of as exclusive.

At the heart of their protests is the fact that JPEGs can shed weight by compression. Compression is a good thing because it makes files smaller, but this format is a lossy compression, which means that there's a loss in quality with each compression. This is opposed to the kind of compression you have with TIFF, which is lossless. They also say that there's a decrease in quality every time you save a JPEG, so while you might not notice the loss in the beginning, you might end up with a degraded file over time.

Shooting dead on
If you shoot hundreds of images every day you're better off shooting JPEG, which download fast and are ready for anything else. The proponents of RAW say you have more leeway to tweak such a file in an editing software like Adobe Photoshop CS2, but professionals counter that when you reach a certain level of skill you've pretty much got the picture right at the camera stage itself anyway. Any basic adjustments in the brightness and contrast can be done to a JPEG image too. And their final answer is that while JPEG compression is known for its lossy quality, the level of compression is chosen by you. So if you want a version of your photo fit for the web, you could select a high compression value that is acceptable to the naked eye but might be insufficient for printing. And yet, proponents of the format say that an original JPEG could give a TIFF image a run for its file size.

Play it safe
So does this mean you should junk RAW, publish in TIFF, shoot in JPEG or dabble in the new PNG? Play it safe – if your photos mean enough to you perhaps you should save them in multiple formats, and that way you're totally insured in the future. Just remember that once you discard information from a format that contains more information you can't get it back. If you delete your RAW and work at your TIFF, you can't save them back to their original format. And once you've compressed your work into JPEG you lose information forever, even if you then save the image with a '.tif' extension.

Perhaps this might work for you: shoot in RAW and then convert the files into both TIFF and JPEG. Now you have two copies of your photos that look identical but are in different formats. Delete your RAW. Save your unedited TIFF's in a secure location, like an external hard disk, CD or DVD. Keep your JPEGs on your computer – you can resize them into copies that can be emailed or posted online and they'll load easily as thumbnails in Windows Explorer or Adobe Bridge. If you need the large files, you can always look up the correct photo from your JPEGs and then find the corresponding file name among the TIFFs.