When dealing with a large number of documents, many people find it easier to merge them all together in a single multipage file. This is not necessarily related to saving space, because you don’t save much when creating a multipage file, but rather to ease of access.
We got this question from a reader who had just been sent an e-mail with an ORF file attached and wasn’t sure whether opening such files is safe or not. Moreover, if it is safe, what software would he need to open it? Because Windows did not seem to be able to handle the file with the regular programs installed.
Are you worried that editing a large group of images requires having advanced image design software installed on your computer? And programs such as Corel or Adobe Photoshop not only tend to be quite pricy, but also require a powerful computer, take up a lot of space on your hard drive and are not necessarily easy to use?
Professional photographers are always interested in finding the optimal file format for storing and editing their photographs. And in the past few years, more and more of them started to prefer the DNG extension.
Though when Adobe released the DNG (Digital Negative) format, in 2004, many people were skeptical about the need for an additional type of raw file when each camera manufacturer already had a typical raw extension for each brand — NEF for Nikon, ORF for Olympus, CR2 for Canon, in time the DNG format grew in popularity.
The TIF (Tagged Image File) format is often preferred by photographers because of the image quality it provides, as well as its compression features and availability for editing. TIFs provide high colour-depth images and smaller processing times than, for example, EPS or AI files. Apart from photography, the TIF format is also used in the professional printing or publishing industry and in graphic art.
As opposed to JPEGs, which provide a “lossy compression” of the image, TIF files can ensure a “lossless” compression, thus retaining all the image details with increased accuracy. This, however, also means that uncompressed TIF files tend to get very large and are more difficult to store or share.
Most passionate photographers like to carefully control all kinds of details related to their photos — from adjusting colours and lights, to correcting red eyes or cropping. And for this reason, they prefer setting their camera to take pictures in RAW format. Also known as “digital negatives”, RAW image files have the great advantage of allowing a wide array of computer editing options.
If you like to take your quality photos with a Fujifilm camera and have just got the new X-E1 model, for example — you will soon discover your RAW image files have the RAF extension. This is the typical format for all Fujifilm cameras, and while generally preferred by photographers, it might prove difficult to handle at first. Why? Because RAF files are not recognized by many regular photo viewers, so you may have problems opening and editing them. Moreover, they have a very large size (up to 6 times more than a JPEG), so sending or moving a large group of photos might prove to be equally difficult.
If you are a professional photographer who learned his trade before digital cameras became as widespread as they are today, you probably remember that you had to have your own technique for keeping track of how you took each photo. Most photographers from the non-digital era had to carry around a notebook whenever they planned a photo shoot, and wrote down details such as exposure, shutter speed, aperture, if they used a flash or not, etc. This way, when handling their images in the photo lab, they could tell what they did wrong or what they did right depending on how the photo turned out.
If you are a fan of Sony cameras, you probably came across this question while trying to see or send your digital photos. For a new owner of a Sony Cyber-shot DSC RX100, such as myself, handling ARW files turned out to be a tricky business. After taking the first series of photos with my brand new camera, I was quite excited to download and view them on my computer. However, I quickly started asking myself what type of files are these “ARWs” downloaded from my camera and why aren’t my regular image viewers able to open them?
When preparing images for print, most professional image handlers are particularly careful about how they manage the colors and tones, so as to make sure what will come out on paper will be according to what they planned while editing the image on screen. For this reason, they might want to pay attention to the configuration of the ICC profiles of their images.
One of our website visitors sent us this question by e-mail a few days ago. She had just downloaded the photos she made with her brand new Canon Powershot and was excited to view them on her computer. However, she soon realized this was impossible to do with any of the regular software she had for viewing photos.