Jpeg fine, normal, and basic.

[Michael Cardenas]

Anyone care to explain to me the difference(like I'm a child haha) between jpeg fine, normal, and basic? I understand the difference between RAW and Jpeg but not between the individual Jpegs. Thank you so much!

 

[Ysarex]

Anyone care to explain to me the difference(like I'm a child haha) between jpeg fine, normal, and basic? I understand the difference between RAW and Jpeg but not between the individual Jpegs. Thank you so much!

Compression rate.

JPEG was designed to compress your data. You can't have it NOT compress your data and the method it uses we call lossy -- that's loss with a "y" because the compression method discards (loss) data. The least amount of data loss when set to fine, more data loss at normal but smaller files and even more data loss at basic with still smaller files.

Digital data compression requires redundancy. The JPEG algorithm creates redundancy in your photo in order to compress it. JPEG lays a grid of 8x8 pixels on top of your photo. In a grid cell there are 64 pixels. In a normal photo it's likely that most if not all of those pixels are unique. If all are unique there is no redundancy and it won't compress. JPEG (very smartly) examines the pixels in a grid cell and starts to change them so that some pixels are the same -- adds redundancy. When JPEG is finished a grid cell that started with 64 unique pixels may now only have for instance 48 unique pixels (fine) or only 36 unique pixels (normal) or only 24 unique pixels (basic).

If you look at the JPEG specification you'll see the creators refer to JPEG as an archive format. In other words once the image is ready to save and store you archive it by compressing it. The data loss created by the algorithm -- the compression grid, will interact with further editing attempts and do some pretty awful things like cause banding and add noise. People who shoot JPEGs typically choose to edit them anyway and benefit from the combination of high resolution cameras and typical image usage (phone) such that they don't see those bad things that are happening caused by their editing. If you're going to do that definitely save all your JPEGs as fine -- less harm done.

 

[LWW]

Anyone care to explain to me the difference(like I'm a child haha) between jpeg fine, normal, and basic? I understand the difference between RAW and Jpeg but not between the individual Jpegs. Thank you so much!

Imagine the same photo at the same resolution in:

- 3X5 (jpeg small)
- 5X7 (jpeg medium)
- 8X10 (jpeg fine)

those proportions won't be perfectly exact, but they should represent the concept.

I hope this helps.