Some of the main characteristics of this format widely used in digital cameras and image capture devices are:
- It’s universal.
- Supports up to 16,777,216 colors, which are produced using 8 bits of each in RGB, 256 tones per channel.
- It can display more than 16 million colors at once for better contrast resolution and color matching.
- its maximum size It is 65,535 x 65,535 pixels.
- Edits are destructive, they alter the file.
- Supports colors CMYK and RGB.
- You can reduce the size in lossy compression up to 75% when saving.
What is it for
It is a format that has been created to compress digital and photographic images, in addition to the websites, since it is not heavy and facilitates usability in accessing the web to users, something especially important if they do not have a high-speed internet connection. In addition, it is a format compatible with most platforms, browsers and programs, being very popular and therefore widely accepted.
If you are going to upload images and photos to a web page, you will appreciate being able to use this format because takes up much less What others. This will make you need fewer web hosting requirements, and will also make it easier for your visitors to navigate. You will not have to worry so much about the limitations of your hosting or that when uploading many images it will yield less. Nor will you have to expand your hosting for a more expensive one because there is not enough space for the content you upload.
Nevertheless, not recommended If it has text or is a logo, since a lot of quality is lost and it shows. It should be noted that it does not support transfers either, so if it does not have a background, a white one will be added.
Advantages and disadvantages
Before using them, it is convenient to know what its advantages and disadvantages are to know if it is the most appropriate or worth opting for another solution, however, it is one of the most widely used and known formats worldwide.
Disadvantages
One of its main disadvantages is that I know lose quality in each of its editions, therefore, the more that are made, the lower the quality of the image. Therefore, it is best to edit them as little as possible, since initially this loss is minimal, but it does exist. It is not, therefore, the most suitable for editing since it is always intended for compression and loss of quality.
In this way, it provides worst results in drawings, illustrations and text, in which images can become pixelated even at their highest quality. Does not support transparent backgrounds or animations and it is not multipage format. Therefore, it is not the most indicated in certain occasions, uses or types.
Advantage
Although it loses quality, it has very good quality after compression and has a wide range of colors. Its main advantage is that takes up little weight, so many more images will fit on the same storage system such as a hard drive, in the cloud, on a pendrive, and it will even allow the creation of websites with fewer requirements and that are easier to view. This also allows save money in some cases, by not having to expand your physical or online storage system or purchase another.
Also, if you are taking pictures, you camera is faster because it takes less time to process. This is especially important when you don’t want to lose detail at a particular moment. Plus, your photos and files are easy to handle in virtually any computer and photo editing program. Provides a high compatibility and it is universally accepted.
Differences with PNG and GIF
In order to better understand what this format consists of and why it is the most suitable on some occasions, it is necessary to know the difference also with other recognized formats such as PNG and GIF. While JPG presents compression with loss of quality, in the case of PNG this is done without loss of quality, so the latter is more suitable for logos, images with text, without a background or line drawings.
PNG is heavier than the previous one and also does not support CYMK, although it stands out for its better image quality. Each of them is used according to the needs, preferences and use of the image, taking into account their most significant differences.
The GIF, for its part, accepts movement and animations. This last format is of low quality and gives little depth of colors compared to the others, however, by allowing several frames to be joined, it allows creating animations that take up little weight and this is one of its main attractions, although it is not usually used. for still images.
Differences between JPG, JPEG and JPEG XL
JPG and JPEG are the same compression format, with its nuances, since one of its differences is that the former would correspond to computer files in an operating system such as Windows, because their file extensions allow 3 characters, while the latter are more used in Mac.
Precisely, JPG exists because older versions of Windows operating systemsfiles, such as MS-DOS 8.3 and FAT-16 files, had a 3 letter maximum limit in file names, something that never happened in other UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux or Mac that did not have this limit. Thus, in the latter systems those saved as JPEG use the .jpeg extension while in Windows it had to be reduced to .jpg in order not to exceed the 3-letter limit. Although extensions of more letters are now accepted in Windows, this is a format that has been used for a long time and we continue to save images with it without ever abandoning it.
The name of JPEG XL It is the same as the previous one, only that a letter X used in the name of several standards since 2000 is added and L that means long term. It has been created to replace the others for a long period of time. The main difference from the others is their greater efficiency, up to 60% or more. In this way, half the weight with the same quality of a fixed is expected to adapt much more to the Internet and web pages.
None of them are due confuse with JPEG 2000, a coding system created by the same Joint Group of Photographic Experts to provide better quality than the previous standard by compressing images without loss thanks to advanced compression techniques in a discrete wavelength transformation. Despite its advantages, its encoding is CPU intensive, incompatible with JPEG, and is neither universally supported nor universally accepted.
Similarities
Both files are practically the same, so they have many similarities, including that both terms have the same meaning. Are images rasterized and not vector. They are used for same image types, being indicated for digital photographs.
They always lose quality that are saved when they are reduced in size. Also, the file size will be smaller than the original and its loading times are faster on web pages. In addition, they are very popular formats that are accepted in most programs, browsers and others, so you will not have any problem with them.
Therefore, although there is a slight difference between them, we could say that they consist of the same type of file, they mean the same thing and their practical use also coincides, so we can use them interchangeably. At least until JPEG XL is released and popularized, as we don’t know how the format will evolve back then.