While at the moment JPEG and PNG are considered to be the most popular formats for storing and transferring images, Google promises things will look different in the future. In 2010, the company launched WebP, a new image format meant to challenge the leading position of the two formats mentioned above. And ever since then, its developers have added several new features and functions, while more and more people have begun to discuss the usefulness of switching to WebP.
In case you happened to find yourself having a group of TGA files (perhaps someone sent them by e-mail or transferred them to your computer) and are not sure how to handle them, here are some quick tips.
The TGA (Truevision Graphics Adapter) format was created in the 1980s by a company called Truevision as a raster graphics file format and it is also referred to as ‟TARGA (Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter) format”. Though the company doesn’t exist anymore under this name, the file is still widely used for storing deep-pixel images and graphics that contain image data up to 32-bits per pixel. You will often find TGA images associated with 3D video games or have them used for still-video editing.
JPG and PNG are two of the most popular extensions for image files, but which one is the best? Some people prefer the JPG format because of its small size, because it is easy to upload online and it is compatible with any image viewer program you might have and with all photo sharing websites. However, JPG is a lossy compression format, which means it discards some of the encoding information of the image so as to ensure the file is not too large. This translates into poorer quality — including some image noise and possibly irregular shapes, which is relevant particularly if you plan to print the image or use it for graphics editing.
If you are the proud owner of a freshly released NX300, or of another Samsung camera model, you might soon discover that answering the question in the title is not as easy as it seems. When downloading the first series of photos on your computer, you might discover their format is not JPEG, PNG or any another image extension that your regular photo viewer can easily recognize. Instead, you will see a bunch of SRW files that your computer does not know how to open and edit.
Have you ever tried to extract raster images embedded in a PDF file? In case cropping and pasting is the first method that comes to mind, you probably think this is time consuming and requires quite a lot of effort, particularly when you want to extract a large amount of images.
With reaConverter’s latest edition, extracting raster images from PDF files and saving them under the desired file format can be included in the conversion process and can be done in no more than a few seconds. Here is how.
Whether you are practicing photography professionally or just as a hobby, you probably like to enhance the quality of your digital pictures by adjusting things such as framing, contrast, white balance and exposure. And in order to have all the control you need on such aspects and several others when it comes to customizing your photo, you probably prefer creating images in a RAW format. In case you are also a Pentax fan, and just got a sleek K-30 model, for example, which you immediately set to take RAW images, you might be puzzled to discover a bunch of PEF files recorded on your camera’s memory card. What are these files and how to handle them?
If you are a fan of Canon cameras, you probably have a bunch of CR2 images stocked on your computer. CR2 is the proprietary format of Canon cameras, used for creating RAW images. Or in other words, images that you can later edit using advanced graphics editing software. While this format might be OK to use if you are a professional designer and if you have Adobe Photoshop or other similar programs installed on your computer, transfer CR2 images, sending or posting them online might pose some problems.
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.
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.