canon powershot digital cameras

The final step before saving the image on the memory card is to compress it. Most cameras use JPEG as a compression format. This reduces the size of the file by eliminating excess data. This information cannot be recovered, so JPEG is called a ' lossy ' format.

Several cameras have the ability to save uncompressed images as TIFF files or raw data. Raw data is the original photosite data even before demosaicing. It can be transferred to a computer for processing with special software that will perform all of the processing functions of the camera but with much greater control.