Photography File Formats

In photography, you are going to work with a few file formats over and over.  In the camera, the most important formats are:  RAW and JPEG (sometimes DNG, depending on the camera).

In post-processing, you will be primarily dealing with JPEG, RAW, TIFF, and PSD (Photoshop) files.  There are other file formats you may deal with when putting images on a web page (GIF, PNG, PDF), but these are more related to using photographs in web design, than photography itself.

Here is a video that summarizes many of the most popular file formats:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17oZ0pg1xLA

Here is a video about RAW versus JPEG files.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBKYkEneJO4

Here are some web pages that describe the various file formats in more detail:

http://www.shortcourses.com/workflow/workflow1-1.html

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/essentials/file-formats/

http://learnmem.cshlp.org/site/misc/tsg_JPEG_instructions.pdf