The PNG file format is a pretty good one although not all applications support it. If you're using photoshop, the best format to save your working images as is thye photoshop format (.psd) That way you can make adjustment layers, snapshots etc. and keep everything together in case you want to change it later. Disk space is really cheap now and there's no reason to recompress your Jpegs. Most places can print from PSD files too.Tell them bnot to touch anything.
It's because I use The GIMP, the PNG format fits in quite well. For those of us using Photoshop, I agree the PSD format is an eminently suitable format.
I think whatever format we decide upon, it's a good choice to use a "non-lossy" format for intermediate saving.
Terry:
As I understand it each and every time you make an ajustment to an image you loose data, TIFF, PNG, JPG, it doesnt matter, once you make an adjustment you have changed information and have lost information ...
Sorry, I may have been too sweeping in my statement. Of course any time the image is adjusted, then some muddying of the waters occurs. For example, unsharp mask modifies the image. After saving, on opening that saved file, we can't use the undo command to reverse the unsharp mask, so some information has been lost, irrespective of the file format.
However because JPG throws away information each time it is saved, if I open an image, then save as something1.JPG, open something1.JPG, save as something2.JPG, open something2.JPG, save as something3.JPG, open something3.JPG, save as something4.JPG, open something4.JPG, by then it should look pretty horrible. And I haven't done any editing at all.
... this is why 16 bit is getting popular you only loose half or less of the information as you would loose in 8 bit.
And that opens a whole new can of worms. <g>
&i (:
