Saving your files

Of course, once you’ve finished working on an image you’ll want to save it, but this isn’t as simple as just clicking Save. You can choose from 20 or so different file formats, each with its own merits. As to which is the best, there are several things to consider. Do you want to re-edit the file later? Have you plenty of space on your hard drive? Do you want to print it? Will you want to email the file or put it on the web?

For most types of image, these three essential file formats are considered the most useful…

PSD A Photoshop document. PSD files preserve all your layers, so you can re-open the file later and continue making edits. This makes it an invaluable file format, but the downside is large file sizes and incompatibility with some non-Adobe software.

TIFF The ‘targeted file format’ is ideal for retaining high quality in your images, so it’s great for prints. You can also choose to keep your layers intact, but like PSD files, this dramatically increases the file size. Like JPEGs, you can compress a TIFF, but unlike JPEGs, there’s no resulting loss of quality.

J PEG ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’ files are by far the most common image format, viewable on all computers and the internet. File sizes are much smaller than TIFF or PSD files, first because JPEGs don’t retain Photoshop layers, second because the format deteriorates the image. This means that every time you open and save a JPEG image, the data is uncompressed then compressed again, resulting in a small loss of data each time you save the image.