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Understanding File Formats with Khara Plicanic

Why are we going to spend a whole session talking about file formats? And the reason is they can be really confusing and overwhelming and particularly if you're new to photo shop, they can just be downright scary, so hopefully we're going to get rid of that fear today and we'll address all the different not all of the formats, but some of the main formats we'll talk about what you use them for and win and all of that, um, so hopefully they won't feel so technical and scary if that makes sense. All right, so I guess to start out, the first thing we way want to acknowledge is that there is no right correct file format. Sometimes when people are new to photo shop, they ask questions to me like, hey, so which format should I just use all the time? And the answer is there isn't one that you just use all the time. There is a right format for a certain purpose, I guess so every format has cem cem advantages in a certain area and some limitations in another area. So that's important to keep in...

mind and the way you decide which format you're going to end up using is going to depend on things like, what are you doing with this image? Is it going to go on the web? Is it going to be printed that will change things a lot, and if it is going to be printed, how is it going to be printed? Because if you're using things like a post script printer, you might want to choose a different file format, so those are some things to think about. Let's, let's move over here to the white bored, I guess, and we'll just kind of talk through some of this stuff, so things to think about? Well, just have a little corner up here, so we want to think about, for example, our output and where that image is going to be used, whether that's web or print except we want to think about do we need to maintain things like layers in our file? Because not every file format skin to support layers, we want to think about things like transparency if we have, for example, some images on a transparent background, you got to be really careful about which format you choose to save those men, and we'll talk about that coming up shortly also things like alfa channels. I'm sure this week there's being a lot said about alfa channels and making selections and saving those selections within your files and not every file formats going to save that, so sometimes you might work really hard to make a selection. And you think you're doing everything right and saving it within your document, but then when you actually go to save the document, if you don't choose the right file format, you might lose that alfa channel in that selection that you already made. Okay, so what we're going to do is kind of talk through some of the different formats, what they stand for and how you would use them and then eventually will move over to the computer and take a look at how you actually create that in photoshopped fair enough. All right? So we'll start, um, I'll come around over here and we'll start with the ever popular ps deep, right? So for those of you that don't know, psc stands for photos up document, right? So this is the native file format for photo shop, and if we want to talk about all of these formats, kind of in terms of advantages and disadvantages, our limitations, we should say when it comes to p s sees what advantage what's an advantage about ps sees well one it's the native format, so that means it's going to retain all of the special information that you save and your that you create in your document, so if you have layers it's going to save your layers if you have spot channels, spot color is going on in your channels panel that will be saved in a psd. It will maintain the integrity of your text, of any vector information that you might have in your file. It's going to save your adjustment layers, all of that stuff is going to be remained intact in a psd document. So that's really good. So the other thing too, is that it's a very high quality file format. It's, unlike some of the other ones, will talk about it doesn't have a lossy compression built into it, so it's going to be high quality on that's? Really good thing. So this ends up being really what we call when I call my my whip file my work in progress file and we'll talk a little bit about workflow once we get through the file formats, but you'll be able to see how the psd kind of works in with other formats you might be using. So that's, psd, some limitations um a psd or reasons why you don't just save everything as a psd, right? Sometimes if it's so great and that's the native format and has all this good stuff going on for it, why don't we just why don't we just save everything as a psd, right? Well, the answer would be one they are, you know, proprietary in the sense that they're for photo shop use right you can read them and other adobe applications like in design and such, but you wouldn't for example, post a psd on a website because the browser is not going to read that you wouldn't email a picture of your puppy that you just photoshopped and have all these layers going on you wouldn't send the psd to grandma to open unless grandma's a designer and has photo shopped, you wouldn't share those files necessarily that same way so it's specific four being used in progress, so whether that's in photo shop or sharing it with another designer or you can import it of course into in design, for example, and other layout programs, but it's really meant kind of to be in your own control, I guess you don't really turn your ps d's loose into the wild in that sense, so that's one thing about it, the other thing about it is that they're pretty big, right? Because they can have layers and they can have all that extra bonus information that makes them really large, so you just you don't trade them like baseball cards. They're meant to really be your master file in a sense. All right, so that's kind of a quick overview of psd, another one we'll start with the ones that people might be the most familiar with, so that would of course include jay bags j peg for the zero whom I end up on jeopardy j bag stands for joint photographic expert group so that's why sometimes you see it written with an e in here, although on our computers, if you're only using a three character extension than the e gets omitted, but joint photographic expert group and what is great about day pegs? They are compact, which there's a flip side to that coin, so we'll come back to that, but they are compact, they are very, I would say universal anybody can open a j peg like my cat could probably open a j anybody conover today, peg, I'm pretty much any device anywhere even you know, ancient web browsers can handle day pegs ancient phones could handle day paige they're very universal, they're everywhere they're sort of our bread and butter of file formats here s o that makes the nice they're compact, they don't take up very much space on our hard drives and everyone can can work with them, so that makes them pretty good. Some limitations of the j peg then are then the opposite of so they are compact because they include something called compression. A lot of different file formats have compression built into them and there's different types of compression, right? The two categories really are lossy compression or lost lists compression okay, those sound like big scary technical words but all that really means is that when the file gets saved there's two different ways of story not information and compressing it one way that j peck make use of is called a lawsuit compression format which means we are actually losing some quality of the image in order to make that j peg so jay pegs would not be considered as high quality as something like a psd or some of the other formats that we're going to talk about that said don't go panicking I used to teach photo shop and I knew a guy who always said that jay pegs were evil and that they were they had four letters because they were evil and that was bad but I don't think that's a fair assessment I think everything has a time in a place and jay pegs can be really great you just have to know what you're using them for right? So for most people if you're saving high quality j pegs, you may not really notice any distinguishable difference between your high quality j peg and say eight if if you print them out they may really actually look the same so it kind of depends, of course that's in theory but j pegs do have compression when you save the j peg we actually created photo shop you get the chance to decide how much compression that files going tohave and we'll take a look at that when we when we get back over to the computer so this compression in a j peg can range from a setting which will see zero quality to twelve twelve being high so when we talk about a high quality j peg, we're talking about one that was achieved with the compression setting of twelve and that's going to be considerably more high quality than something you know, like zero r five or something like that so there is compression built in that scares people sometimes because they hear you know, you read in a magazine and you hear stuff that every time you save a j peg it's getting more compressed and that is true it really does happen every time you open a j peg and then save it again it is becoming further compressed so in that sense, if you did that like an obscene number of times, you would actually see the file size shrinking because you're compressing all that information out of the file s o that's true, but that doesn't mean that j pegs don't still have a place in our world. I love j pegs I use them all the time so don't be afraid of them just no what they really are so sometimes I think people tend to kind of overreact about the whole compression thing, so don't let it scare you that's my message there all right, so jay packs and of course then sort of the opposite of a j peg would be tiff and tiff stands for tagged image file format who write very glamorous and what's great about tips they are super high quality so they're going to maintain a lot of information in your file that's one of the main reason that people like them the compression that takes place in a test is lossless compression so that's why they're so high quality they're compressed in a way that doesn't actually damage the quality of the image that's a good thing about tiffs and I should point out tips can have layers so I'm drawing a smiley face next to the word layers because it supports layers where as I forgot to mention j pegs could not have layers when you save them they can also not have transparency okay, so that's what the limitation there on j pecs tiffs, however, can have layers they can't have transparency if you're working with spot colors and stuff that can be stored within a tip as well. So that's really great it used to be I feel like tiffs used to be a lot more in demand I suppose it depends also on the type of work that you d'oh but I know back in my earlier days for example, if I would just take any simple prate border to my lab they demanded tips like even just a simple print order had to be given to them in tiffs but nowadays, if you even tried to do that, a lot of the you know, ordering systems online won't even take a tip, so that kind of puts it in a little bit of perspective for you, so tips are very high quality I make them when they're requested if somebody requested to for me like the books that I'm working on that's going to be coming out later this year from peach pit press, the graphics that I'm producing for that book, they request tips so I make them tips, but in my normal everyday life, I don't just choose to make tips for the fun of it only when it's really serving a purpose so that's good stuff about tips, some limitations about tips they are freaking huge freaking huge files, right freaking huge and they're not supported everywhere. For example, on the web you can't have a tiff file, so they're huge, but they're they're more limited in terms of support and you may find that some some programs may not support tiffs, but certainly the web doesn't either. So when we talk about compression, sometimes people have a hard time really understanding what that means, so let me just clarify that quickly to compression has to do with the way that the data is stored within the file okay, so it's different than talking about resolution? They're not the same thing all right pick ful and pixel dimensions and pixels per inch and all that good stuff is totally not related to compression you can have the same image with the same number of pixels and you can save it as a j peg and then you can take that same file and save it as a tiff same number of pixels save everything but the tiff is going to be four times as big on your hard drive approximately or even actually it can be more than that, so it'll really just depend but that's important to keep in mind that when we talk about compression we're really talking about just the way the information is stored. We're not talking about the number of pixels that are in the file ok, so those are always going to be equal we're just talking about file size on the hard drive another way to think about compression one way that I like to explain it if we were comparing j peg scientists if you were packing to go on vacation and you were bringing let's say two pairs of pants and three sweaters all right, so some people would pack that in like the biggest suitcase ever, right? If you've ever watched like martha stewart packets always beautiful on her things that she was has like matching shoe bags and all these fancy things and a nice big suitcase where everything fits very comfortably and that's. Great. Then you could take the same amount of clothes, the same two pairs of pants and three sweaters and you could show them into a smaller a bag like a backpack, right? And then you could go on vacation taking just a small backpack instead of your big huge suitcase on. When you get to your destination, you're gonna have the same amount of clothing. You would still have those two pairs pants and those three sweaters. But if they're super compressed into a j peg and you drop that quality, like way down when you get there and you open up that backpack, you might have to get the iron out and iron your clothes, because now they're wrinkled. Hey, where as if you packed in a nice big suitcase like a test, then the clothes they're going to come out a little nicer on the other side. But it's still the same amount of clothing when you get there, does that make sense? So I love that analogy. It works for me. So hopefully that works for folks at home as well. That's how compression works so it's not related to resolution. It's related to the way the data is actually stored within the file. So hopefully that makes sense and we can come back to that if we need to and we will see it and finish up when we get over there to the computer. All right? So some other formats that are pretty popular or well used, I should say tiffs let's see let's talk about thes air kind of the three biggies but let's talk about here's a fun one jeff files or as many people say, gif files and we could probably start a huge battle about how you pronounce that correctly. But as I was just talking about with the sunday during the lunch break, it's actually written into the file like instructions and the coding of the file that it's pronounced jif like the peanut butter, which, if you're really curious if you go to how to pronounce def dot com, you can find there really is a website how to pronounce stiff for how to pronounce g I f you can go to the website and look up and there's all kinds of hilarious comments and people are really passionate about their pronunciations but there's some funny videos teo and yeah, so winning doubt check that out, but we'll go with jeff so gifts stands for graphic interface format, graphic interface format and it's really intended for webb graphics it's intended for webgraphics ok, so it's not it's not going to support the full sixteen point seven million colors of eight that image it's really going to support two hundred fifty six colors? Which is why it's intended for webgraphics not web photos um so hopefully that will clarify that with nice about jeffs is that they can support transparency so there's my little symbol for that smiley face for transparency uh, they're really best used for logos, for example, so if you go to like a company website like target or something, if you right click on their logo in the corner and say that you'll see that it's a jiffy pop so because they only support limited amounts of colors they're not made for photos because of that ah, but that also keeps their file size very, very tiny so they're very lightweight and efficient for use on the internet because of course, when it comes to webb and putting images on the web, the whole name of the game is speed right? You want your website to load as insanely fast as possible because we all know that we have attentions fans of zero so you want your graphics to load quickly so when you can use a jiff, then that's what you want to use so for logos and such that makes great sense but not so much for photos all though jeffs can also be animated so we've I'm sure we've all seen animated just around on the internet trying to get you to refinance your house ever but there's also a really cool thing I don't know if you guys have seen the cinema grass anybody seen they're really cool and if you're not sure what a cinema graph is it's a it's a really I guess more exciting reincarnate of the animated gifs that try to get you to refinance your mortgage and if you're curious if you go to cinema graphs dot com they have exquisite examples of animated photos so instead of a person who's like like leinart dancing on the side of your web browser trying to sell you something instead they're these exc with photographs where it might be like like a woman standing in a window and she's not moving except maybe like maybe her skirt is flowing but everything else is still so it's really subtle instead of the kind of obnoxious levels of animations that we're used to and animated just the scenery graphs are are really different and they're just beautiful so check that out at simi graphs dot com they're gorgeous but anyway those are animated jeffs so and they get away with photos in there but they if you look really carefully they are going to be limited in terms of their color so they wouldn't reproduce well for print it's really a web a web format or device like mobile device kind of a thing so that is a jiff and then related to that there's a file called you should try another marker here called pinging which stands for portable network graphics they all have really warm and fuzzy akra tibbs don't they watering fuzzy meanings here? So portable network graphic and some people have joked that it really stands for ping not jif so take that as you will but what these are they're similar to jeffs in the sense that they can support transparency and in fact they do it they do it quite better than a jeff does jeffs for example if you have a logo and you've got a drop shadow behind it the jif can't really render different levels of transparency right? And the drop shadow would have a sort of grady in't of transparency where it goes from really heavy shadow and then it fades into total transparency and just can't do that with jeffs something is either transparent or it is not there are no levels of transparency so that's why pings were created because they can support actual levels of transparency so you can have dropped shadows and such with a ping file that you could it with a jiff it would look really garb lee and kind of just growth and you know what you'd have to do is kind of fake it with the gifts and you'd have to include matting and that makes editing websites really a pain in the butt so pings prevent a lot of that, and people like it for that reason for the transparency and it's also very high quality because it includes a lot list compression. So in that sense, ping is very similar to a tiff it's, very high quality, so you'll see this on the web, and I even run into it in print as well, which I guess I wasn't expecting, but it happens because it is so high quality it's, another great format for even print images. So if you are really into digital scrapbooking, for example, you may find that some of the kits and things that you buy the those files may actually come as pings instead of ps d's or something I would have expected ps tease, but, uh, this would make it more universal for other applications as well. But that's a ping file, another one that we see around is e p s, which stands for encapsulated post script, huh? More trivia for you. This has really meant for vector art. Now it can include pixels as well. I mean, you can save an image. That's got pixels and something like text. You can save it as an e p f, but the main reason for creating an m p s it would be to maintain the vector aspect of your artwork or your file so I like to think of ups as the j peg of illustrator so when you export from illustrator just as you wouldn't email your friends your psd files I mean unless you really unless they're planning to get them so they can work with them but if you're just sending grandma picture of your dog, you wouldn't do it as a psd you would probably send a j peg when you export from something like illustrator it's commonly exported as an m p s file because it's going to maintain all the vector information. So when we talked about text to the other day we learned that text is made out of vector information it's not made out of pixels and that is a perfect candidate for ups and it's meant to be produced on a post script printer so if you've ever produced fine itch maybe you're working you're making a banner for something and you're working with a banner signed shop they're going to be asking you for an e p s file because their printers they're going to need access to the font information and the vector information that gets stored differently in an e p s file than it would in the j and their printers are going to demand it actually so it really depends on the output of the device anybody have questions on that good so far all right so that's device device driven like so many things and it's for victor vector info all right another one will just kind of move some of this over here another one, of course is pdf which probably most people are familiar with pds stands for a portable document format does anyone remember show of hands? Maybe I'm just aging myself here or showing my geekiness but does anyone remember the television commercials that used to air for pds knowing someone kind of no I'm alone in this I'm totally alone okay I will own that that's okay I maybe I dreamt this but I'm pretty sure it was reality. So this file formats really say it's portable document format and of course what super about it is that it makes our documents portable hence the name so we were able to take things created in programs like illustrator or photo sabor even auto cad and we could share them with one another because before you had to have for example in designed to open and in design document or maybe you could export that is a jpeg but that's not really very user friendly for multi page documents you can't do that so pdf they're great because they allow us to take things from one software and share it with another if you're working with architects and they're doing things and auto cad you know I can't open an auto cad file. So the pdf so great for that and the tv commercial that's why I love this the tv commercial that I swear I'm not making up. It was people in an office environment and they would walk around carrying a white box with a red ribbon. So you remember the icon I mean it's been re stylized, but the icon for pdf is sort of this really stylized gift box with a bow. Yes, so in the tv commercial that I swear I'm not making up, people would walk around in this office with this gift box, and they would just kind of like, set it on the desk of their co worker, and then they'd walk off, and then the co worker would come back from lunch and be like, oh, there's, a gift on my desk and it's a pdf isn't that clever? I thought that was I thought it was genius, but maybe I made the whole thing up in a dream. So who knows? But it's answer a portable document format so is used for are those types of things. But you can also save your photographs as the pdf and why would you do that? It would really be for a specific use it wouldn't just because you felt like it or you like the story I just told you about my commercial that I may have been dreaming it would really be for specific use so some nice things about pdf are that it's also lost list compression so that makes it very high quality as well and you can save things like spot color in a pdf you can also have layers in a pdf you have a lot of photo shop goodness so it's it's pretty all around a pretty good format in that sense, but again you wouldn't just choose it because you feel like it you would choose it because someone's needing it from you that way so when in doubt when you're looking at these file formats and these are only a few, of course if you look through the list and photo shop it's quite long, I mean there's things like pixar in there, which is really fun for three d really intense three d animation stuff, but you don't choose a format just because you know your friend is using it or it sounds good is usually driven by whatever output and when in doubt you can always ask right? So if you're working on a project and you're like, oh, I'm not sure what I should be doing or how this should work call the printer or call the lab or call the album company or call whoever is going to be receiving your files and asked them what they need from you and then you can avoid all kinds of drama and all kinds of headaches um in that sense but it's important to know how this stuff works because the files can you mean you can save you can have a file that you think everything's great and then you save it in the wrong format and it's going to do for example, how many of you have ever created something with a transparent background and maybe you've worked really hard to remove the background from something right? Some fancy mass skiing and all of this kind of stuff going on and you get the background knocked out and then by force of habit perhaps you save as a j peg what is going to happen when you re open that document? I know you guys aren't mike so I suppose that the rhetorical question that all have to answer but yeah so what would happen if that when you open that j peg leader all your hard work is going to be for not because the background will no longer be transparent it will be magically filled with white yes so hopefully people are having some ah ha moments I know when I talk about this stuff at home people are always like oh, gosh that's why that happened all the time and that's a really frustrating thing and people you know, put up with it, but you don't have to put up with it. You just have to choose the right format, so if you're working on something with transparency, don't save it as j peg, right? Save it as possibly a psd, possibly a ping, possibly tip for jif something that's going to support transparency, but j peg does not new transparency there, so I'll give you a demonstration of what that looks like. I'm trying to think if I'm forgetting any kind of sort of more mainstream file formats, I think that's probably most of it let's talk before we dig into the computer side of it, and I'll show you how you make all this stuff let's talk a little bit about how the workflow happens, because that tends to be kind of confusing for folks. I think andi sometimes people just get nervous and they sort of over save things. They may save p fds for every single thing they touch in photo shop. I've made some house calls at home, where people have the same file saved, it has like twenty seven different ps cities and so let's talk about this and how this works, right? So let's pretend we'll pretend that we're making a fictitious I don't know advertisement or design or something for the zoo, right? And maybe we're going to make or maybe we're making like a birthday announcement for your kid and they're having a zoo themed party so here's our documents so we we would start with either a blank document or a template that you download from whoever is going to print your announcement, right? So we've got this this will probably come as a psd file and then we have we have image files that were going to composite into this document okay, so those image files will probably start a jpeg maybe you went on a safari recently and you photographed all kinds of wildlife, so maybe you have a picture of a zebra and maybe you have a picture of a gorilla and I don't know what's another good animal giraffe all right, so we've got all these different day pegs and we're going to put them into this document here we're dragging them over right and building a composite, so this becomes are working file on ben let's say we have worked so hard on this like were really into it, so we send a lot of time on it and now we've got to go run some errands or whatever quit for the day were done, so what format would we want to save this s pfc right? Because why layers right because we've got all these layers we have layers for the zebra that gorilla the draft maybe we've you know, maybe we've used some brushes maybe we put some whales and their from I haven't worked whales and somehow maybe we've we've added whales we have all kinds of things going on so we have all these layers so we want to see this as a psd because that is going to be our master file now let's say we're finally happy with it we come back the next day because we saved it as a psd it's got everything in it all of our layers all of our happy adjustment layers or alfa channels or whatever is going on it's all there now let's they were ready to prove this teo whoever to our client or whoever needs to see it what should we dio first thing is probably flattened everything and maybe reduced the size if we're going to be e mailing it as a proof to our clients what format might we send them this whole thing as a proof we could kind of kind of any really but probably just j peg rate get all j peg I don't like it when people hate andrzej pecs they're not you know they have they serve a purpose so we would probably just send this is j p so here we go j peg and you know we'll call this a proof so we'll send out this proof j peg and now let's say the client looks at this and they're like oh well that looks pretty good but for my party I don't want a gorilla I want in a ring attain I don't even know how you feel that I should have picked an easier animal ok so they went into a rang a tang so what do you do that at this point where do we go teo to finish working on this we're going to go back to our layered psd right? We'll find an image of a neuron getting hopefully we shot went on safari you're with the camera with the camera hopefully was shot with care right? So hopefully we have that and then we'll get our bring attained j peg and dragged that into our psd so now we have another layer and maybe we hide the gorilla because we probably wouldn't want to throw it away because as it tends to go clients will see something and they'll say I want it different then you do it different than they say oh never mind I liked the gorilla so I could keep the gorilla just hide it and then we would need to save this to update the original psd that we had right this is where I see a lot of mess happening on hard drives is people will go oh now I need to make a new psd so they'll have their psd that they started with that has you know just the gorilla then they'll make a new one for the iran attain and any other edits that they would make and that's it's not very necessary right that's why we have layers we can hide them weaken group them we can organize them we want to keep them there you can do of course layer cops right so you can have different versions of your psd within your one single file and I think that's important to keep in mind because like I said I've made some house calls where people just are confused and lost because they've got thousands of disease and they're all pretty much the same and even they don't know what the difference is and which is the actual like really file anymore so you wouldn't want to make a new p stu we just want to update this one so instead of choosing save as and making a new copy of it you would just his safe so this would update then you can prove out another j peg so we'll say proved too and then if this gets approved right then you can go back to your psd that's got all your resolution and all your all your pixels in it because these would be lower as proof then you can come back to your psd flatten it do any final whatever obsessing you want to dio and then save that and depending where you're using it, that could also be a j peg but you know, higher quality with all the pixels and everything and then this is what you would print does that make sense so that's kind of how the workflow happens? Um and then of course if if someone decides oh, well we love that so much now we want as a web banner then you would go back to here do any adjustments you might wantto dio and then, you know, save it again in another format for the web so in this case probably a pin because it would be photographic so you wouldn't want to choose a jiff because that's really for logo's and such but ping would be good or you could do j peg, if we had transparency, you might choose ping, but otherwise you could do j peg on the web as well. So that's kind of how that works when you're working with all these different file formats, it can also be really helpful within your folder structure to keep things organized. So personally I don't like to mix my j pegs with p s d's and proofs and you know final images and all of that so I would have a project folder project folder and then within that I would have a folder for ptsd and a folder for proofs and a folder for final and that's where I would store everything and possibly I would also make a folder for source files source files, right that's where you put all your safari images so you know what you're dealing with and not just keep everything really nice and neat and saves you time too, so when they come back to you and want to make changes, you're not having to dig through and try to figure out which versions the most recent sometimes we get into the case where we're like ok, this is the final, you know, approved j peg and then there's a but and then you have, like, final to final three the final final really? I mean it this time j peg, I can kind of go on like that, but having a nice folder structure helps keep that stuff really simple, so if we're not forgetting any kind of major formats, weaken, swing on over to the computer and speak or did you have a question way got him? I guess I just wanted to ask you from other than j pigs any raw formats if there was anyone offs because we know that we've got our our normal like any ifs and c r two's right that's a good question, yes, so there are some other formats for things like raw right? So the raw format is going very on manufacturer right? So, like cannon raw file format, the extension is different than on nikon, so then adobe in an effort to preserve the archival. This is not a word, I don't know the archival ability of all the different formats they came up with what's called the digital negative ding file and that's sort of the generic raw format. So if you've got if you work in a studio where some people shoot cannon and some people showed an icon and whatever, you just wanted a good practices to convert everything to doom and that way, it's adobe has pledged to support this into the future, so a lot of things are being converted to digital negatives, but this isn't necessarily a format that you would like. Take your finished artwork and save it to this it's more for camera rockin virgins, so, yeah, good question we have another just to clarify with pings a popular transparency issue, they pretty much the same seenem qualify as an alternative to j pegs, but you could just use them on the web. You can use them on the web? Yep, and graf more and more browsers are supporting them there's also a different levels of ping and we didn't talk about we didn't get into bit depths and all of that kind of stuff here, we're going to keep it a little more streamlined than that but some images can can support like hdr and greater bit depths of some of them are more for a bit and some of them can support sixteen and twenty four and thirty two so it just kind of depends ping I think it can go up to twenty four bit but possibly higher but it may not be as supported by different browser and what sort of size although I feel remaining them they're not they're pretty large because they're high quality and it's intelligent and yeah, they're going to be larger than j pegs they're going to be kind on part with tips and what I'm going to do when we get to the computer is we're going to take the same file and save it in different formats so we can see how the size so we can see two things one the different options that each format presents as well as the final size of the image in terms of hard drive space so we can see how they weighed in yeah just to clarify is thie idea of png supporting vectors a uh urban legend oh that's a good question you know? And I'm not sure if I know the answer off the top of my mind because if I am saving vectors I'm usually doing gps stuff there's also another format called s v g scaleable vector graphic that is more specifically for vectors so there's a lot of different formats out there, and I think when you have need for a specific format, you'll run into it because someone is going to be asking you for it for whatever kind of project you're working on. So these air kind of the main mainstream ones, you know, obviously there's things like I mentioned pixar, which most of us probably aren't using, but that doesn't mean that you might not be who knows, but these are kind of the main, the main options that you'd run into most of time. There's also something called j peg two thousand. You've probably seen that and photo shop and wondered, what the heck is the difference? It's a bit of a newer j peg format, and it has the ability to have actually lost list compression in it. So when you save a j peg two thousand, you can choose lossless compression, so, in a sense, it's a higher quality j peg, but it's also not as supported kind of it's, not as ubiquitous as the j pegs are, so proceed with caution, I would say, but let's, head over to the computer and see how some of the stuff shakes out when we get get over here, all right, so first of all, I guess first let's start with a, um an image that has transparency and we'll save it as a j peg and we'll save it as something else that supports transparency just so you can see in case in case you're not sure what that really means we're going to go ahead and create a little image here whips helps if I hit the right keys there we go with some transparency so here we have the taxi cab from the other day that's now on a transparent background and we have layer is going on so if I didn't know any better and I simply thought, oh this great now I worked so hard to remove this taxi from that drone and I'm just gonna pop over here and do file and I'm going to hit save as and we'll leave it right there and we'll select j paige look what happens it's starting to warn me so you got to pay attention right? People don't pay attention to their warnings very often and then they wonder why things don't work. So we're seeing little yellow caution symbols here next to the alfa channels and next two layers and that's because jay pegs don't support those things deepak that really they're just kind of simple so they don't have all that stuff but let's say that we are ignoring that because people do that sometimes, so we'll just go ahead and be like, yes sure on I'll call this let's make a new folder here actually file formats and we'll save it in here all right? And we'll call it just in case we don't see the extension will call it london cab gaping and we'll hit safe here is where we get the options for j peg so remember that j pegs have built in compression like they always have compression you can't not have a compression in them but you can control how much compression they have and as I mentioned earlier the scale ranges from zero two twelve so if we look here and we dragged the quality slider to zero, which is like the crappiest j peg you could ever make, we see the estimated file size would be one eighty seven k fish that's pretty low this is a big file this is I think a ten by ten, three hundred pixels per inch so small if we then dragged us all the way up to the best j peg ever we're talking about one point seven meg's that's a huge difference and when we drag this around we're not removing pixels remember that we're just changing the compression. In other words, this would be like a really nice big backpack that we're putting the day pagan and if I dragged this over here now we're talking about like a handbag, a very small and so it's going to be pretty wrinkled over there anyway, we'll set this to a large high quality j penn and you'll notice in the background what's happening is our transparency disappeared and already filled in with white and we'll go ahead and click ok and this is where it gets confusing is now the minute we click ok hey suddenly it looks like all is fine and what's care talking about she's crazy because I have a j peg right here with transparency but this isn't a j peg if we look up here at the little tab for our image we see that this is actually the psd so what we're looking at is the psd and the j peg was saved as a copy on the hard drive and even if we had started with the j peg and removed the background what we would be seeing here in photo shop would be the active j peg that currently has transparency because we're in photo shop but the one that's actually saved on the hard drive does not summing sense so just to prove it then let's go ahead and open that file so here's our day peg that we just made and uh there is that white box around it so those of you have ever made logo designs or something you create some really clever graphic and then use david is a j peg and then you cry a little bit later when the white box shows up that is why ok, so if we go back to our london cab over here and this time we choose file save as and we could just call it ptsd, we could just make that what it is let's find our file formats so london cab we'll just make a new one here lemon cat psc so down here under format this is where we choose all of that stuff so by default it's already selected photo shopped for us because it knows that this file contains layers meaning transparency and not just a background as well as alfa channels that's how I was able to select the cab so quickly so it's going to suggest photo shop for us some of you may also wonder what is the difference between photo shop and this thing called large document format the file extension for that is p s be like big so it's a large document format and you could say that it stands for photoshopped big and that's used for files that are over like two gig and size so really big files if you've got something just really joy enormous, there is a size limitation to these different file formats, so if you max that out, then you could save as a large document format so that's what that's intended to be and that's the dot he s b all right, so we'll go ahead and say photo shop will hit save and it didn't pop up because we must have turned that off in preferences somewhere but at home you will see that when you save a psd you'll get a pop up that jumps up on your screen and asks you if you want to maximize compatibility yes have we seen these right and there's little to box and what that means is when you elect to maximize the compatibility photo shops going to save a composite like flattened version of the file within the psd format and that makes it more user friendly for some other applications it also helps with some earlier editions of photo shop if you are sending that to someone who may have an older person they may not be ableto open it without that so that's what that means in case he wondered it will increase your file size slightly but it's not going to be you know dramatic it's a good idea to maximize your compatibility and I've noticed personally at home when I'm working if I don't do that I won't see the some nails that get generated so if I'm like browsing in bridge it'll just have the icon for the psd instead of the thumbnail so you may run into that as well but that's what that means all right let's take the same file and let's compare I guess the photo shop the jpeg tio where are we does top we'll compare them in file size the's too now this is the ornament you let's just do it and find her. All right. So one point nine meg's for the jpeg with no transparency and the psd with all the layers and the transparency and everything. Sixty one megs of a big difference, right on that's. Great when you need all of those layers and such but that's, why you wouldn't just take any just any image that you open on dh just save it as a psd just because it sounds fun, it will really dramatically increase the file size let's, go back to photo shop and save one of these as a tiff them so we'll choose file, save as and will come down to tiff, and tiff will support those alva channels. It will support the layers. Um, and we'll come over here and it would support spot color as well, but we don't have that going on when we click. Ok, then. Now we're presented with tips, options so pretty much every different format that you choose is there going to be followed with options for that format? So for tiff, we can choose, actually the type of compression that we want to apply to it so we can choose none we can choose, this is a lost list format. I think it's an acronym for like three people's names but I can't remember off the top of my head zip or we could even turn on tape I'd compression if we wanted but we'll go ahead and say none and we'll click ok and it's telling us that include including those layers is going to increase the file size as we would imagine so we'll get that saved and let's pop over back to hear and see what we have for our tiff in terms of file size we can compare all right and our tiff is eighty seven meg's so even bigger than the psd file those tips are bad boy legs big don't mess with the two files so they're really learned um just give you an idea how that works let's do one more as a ping just we can compare it because I know we had some questions about that so we'll save this one more time as a ping now here we're going to get warnings again because things not going to support layers and it's not going to support the alfa channels will go ahead and hit I guess we should call us paying comparison lean and we'll get some options here and we can include no compression or some compression with a ping but it is going to be lost lis so we'll go ahead and do none just for to see how big we can really make this thing and we'll click ok and we'll pop back down here where is our pain here, otis, tell us how big this is. Thirty six mex so when we compare these file sizes we should really be comparing the ping to the j peg because they're both flat and so are j peg was what? Thirty six and r j pigs over here one point nine in the pings thirty six so it's still quite a bit bigger than r j peg even but it's not as big as the tips or the psd is not kind of mind blowing. I just think the file formats air so interesting that way so really important stuff to keep in mind the highest quality option would be that tip file that's just huge. Another thing that we can dio when we're saving especially for the web is we have the option to save for the web up here under file saved for webb and we probably will get a warning here. Maybe we try to hit save we might get a warning because this files a really big so you might want to resize it first let's do that we'll resize us to something more realistic for the web like six hundred pixels instead of three all right, so and we're saving something for the web you want to come up here and do file save for web specifically and we wouldn't choose j peg of course because if we wanted to maintain that transparency the j peg is not going tio give us that so we would be better off choosing pings and here's where we can choose like an eight bit ping or twenty four bit ping and eight that's going to be more widely supported than the twenty four bit necessarily um or we can choose our jif and here's where we see the colors that we're going to be limited tio if we wanted to add a match to this to help with any transparency issues so if we wanted it to maintain the transparency we'd want to go with ping for this particular image what's nice about this box is down here we can see exactly what the file size is going to be and how much time it would be estimated to take for loading on various connection speeds so we've got a fifty six k develop modem here but there are people who still have that so it's good to know and we can come in here and change you know, to seed on different sort of connections how how long that files estimated to take for loading so let's compare them that ping teo the j peg and quite a bit of difference this is still pretty large but even within these settings over here we can come over and choose the compression for the j peg and here instead a ranging from zero to twelve it's just with words like medium compressed j peg or maximum would be the twelve and then we have a quality slider over here, so instead of zero to twelve, we've got zero to one hundred, but you can see if we leave this at one hundred were up to thirty seconds on a dial up motive uh, and if we dial this down we can get it all the way down to three seconds and you get a preview of the the compression that's going to be taking place to the image so we can look right here and see this is where you you actually would want to spend a lot of time and the name of the game would be too see how much you could compress the file before you start making it look bad so that you can arrive at what would be the fastest download time but yet still the highest image quality if that makes sense so where that would be? Yeah, and I guess it would depend to how large you're planning on having this image display. I mean, if this was going to be a huge graphic on your website, you'd want to make sure you're more careful with it. If it's going to be a little tiny icon, perhaps you can get away with compressing it you know, quite a bit more because it would be so much smaller but you'd be surprised what you can get away with if you want to imbed your color profile here you can go ahead and do that and then you would just go ahead and hit save and it would ask us where we want to save it we'll put it in our same folder this would be our web j peg all right and safe. So if you do a lot of web developing and went to a web design, then you're probably going to send a lot of time there. So I know my husband spends a lot of time in that that dialogue box one other option I would show you quickly is the pdf so if you had a spot color in this document, one of the options for saving this file with spot color would be pdf so you would just like normal come up to file save as and from our drop down here we would choose photo shot pdf and this will support our layers that will support our alfa channels. Little support our spot color if we have that and when we click save we're going to get this message that's telling us that we can override all the settings that we just saw on our screen in the neck window so this is the save for pdf option and again, you wouldn't just do this just because you have a picture of your puppy and you want to send it to grandma would really be for a specific use like spot color would be a really good one, or again, like an e p s file format, pds will maintain the vector information, so if you have vector graphics or text within your image, and you are sending that to a printer that's going to be working with the post script premier, they're gonna want gps vector data so you could do gps or possibly also pdf. You just want to make sure if you wantto maintain all of those layers and such, you want to make sure that in here, under options, that you have a check mark next to preserve the photo shop editing capabilities, otherwise it will flatten it, and you won't have some some of those features that you may have chosen this format specifically for so that's good also, you can come through here and change some of these settings as well. You should know, though, that when you save these things, they're going to get converted when photo shop opens them later, so we'll go ahead and hit safer right now and also you what I'm talking about let's, come over to this graphic that's got some vector information and text and all kinds of things. This is what we we created this thea other day when in our text lesson so we were saving this and we wanted to maintain all of our type players. We would choose our type information. We would choose gps, for example. So if we come up to file and we choose save as and we choose e p s photoshopped gps right here, um, and we'll put it in the same folder for clarity. All right, let's get, um well, just go ahead and hit save we get another pop up here and I'm going to go ahead and leave this where it is. And when we close this and we go to open another one here's where photo shops going to rast, arise it. So this is a good thing to know, I guess it's, keep in mind if you are saving this with your text because you want to come back and work with the text, you want to save it as a psd, right? So you still have all your layers and everything. But if you're saving this for final output to send to a printer to a post script output, then you could save the final version as an m p s instead of like a j peg or something if the printer needs the information but when you re open it and photo shop you're going to get this in from this kind of box which is basically saying hey, this is an e p s graphic now we're going to render it in a pixelated world right in a pixel environment that photo shop is so it's going to ask us basically what resolution do we want to render this as and we can pick anything we want here because all of that was vector information so we'll go ahead and have this in rgb and we can I mean we could make this however big we wanted in a large format document you can go up to three hundred thousand we won't do this but you can go up to three hundred thousand pixels for dimensions that's crazy let's just go ahead we'll just say eight hundred well pop this open and it's now rendering it and if we look at our layers palace we don't have the layers anymore even though we saved this with them they're now gone even though the vector information was there so we could render this that whatever size we wanted so that's great but once we render it now it's done basically so when you're working with documents like this that have vector information if you want to be able to get that back and toe work with it and change it and edited you still want to save it as a psd your output would be ups, then that makes it. You could also say this is a j peg that would work. Obviously, if I was going toe blogged this or posted online, our just printed at home, I could just print as a j peg, but if I was sending it to a professional print shop, they would want the file because of all the vector, the text, for one thing and the shapes a swell that makes sense so kind of surprising, right, but a way around that, I suppose, is if you place a vector file and gps instead of choosing file open, if you choose file, place and you place the file, then you'll get it with all the vector bits in it, although this one had layers so that's a little bit different. But if someone sends you a logo, for example, and it's in vector format, if you open it and photoshopped, you're going tohave to restaurants it because that's, a photo shop does everything. So if you were hoping to get it in and maintain it like a smart object and be able to scale it and all of that, then instead of choosing file open, you would choose file, place, and then it won't get rest arised, so you can work around that. So any questions you can toss it over to you well we have one right here yeah you know okay okay so for the pdf saving files is p s actually I didn't know I could just do it and photo shop so I was printing as a pdf and it's a lower quality and so this questions kind of based on uploading to make a magazine online okay is there a way to save multiple pdf says one file through photoshopped oh that's a good question well there is a way with acrobat that you can combine multiple pdf into a single pdf but if you are designing like a magazine type of thing you really would be best off doing that and something like in design that's what in design is for and if you're not familiar with in design I am a huge and designed like a maniac andi if you are a member of creative cloud then you have in design already or or perhaps you've bought the whole you know design premium collection you may already have in design but it's really a fantastic program and I talk a two day course here on it previously but it's really great and it's meant for multi page documents so I use it for magazine layouts I use it for album design and I use it for all of the marketing materials I create in my studio for clients um and even when I'm when I'm creating keynotes for speaking I actually build my keynotes and in designed to and then I export them to j pegs and throw them into kino but I build them in and inflict because it's so it's so great so yeah and then there you would just save it as a pdf and it'll just have all the pages in one pdf and one stop shop yeah, anything with multiple page design you want to be using something like in designed for I noticed that when you were saving each of the files that you didn't embed the color profile when I was just wondering if oh yeah wass that's a good question embedding the color profile usually ideo I just kind of wasn't going to go into every detail of all the files because they're really a lot of it can be overwhelming, but I usually do in bed the profiles so what that looks like down here there's a little option under color to embed the color profile and I would usually turn that on but again I'm not going to pretend to be a color management guru because I am not so winning doubt you could always check with your output vendor and see if they have any preferred file formats are color profiles for you too using and it also kind of depends on the way you've got your your format set up in your color preferences so if we if we pop over to preferences um under photo shop and we have oh no, wait a minute I think it's under and it color settings there we go so within that your color settings in photo shop you can have it set up so that your different profiles for rgb seem like a and grey scale they either get preserved or they get changed and converted s so there might be a time where you're gonna work in one color space one profile but you want to save back too the original profile so you may not want to embed it but usually I I am embedded every chance that I get I have that turned on all the time but I'm not going to pretend to be a color profile guru so I don't want to leave anyone to stray but ah lot of times where I see that that makes the biggest difference is when I'm posting something online if I don't embed the s rgb space that may end up in a different rntv space and then the color's not quite you know it looked great when I made it and then I posted on my block or something and I'm like, you know what just happened and it could be a simple as I forgot to embed the color profile so that would be something I normally would do yeah like in question can you talk a bit about the quality settings in j peg to related issues one why's there the year to twelve and zero to one hundred or one hundred but more importantly I read about like sweet spots like people talk about oh you know if that's seven or eight is fine and you know which is good yeah exactly this is your good enough anyway yeah police so that's a good question yes so it is kind of funny first of all when we go to save something as a j peg and now I'm blind and I can't see I'm here jake back there when we go to see if something is a j peg through that file menu we get this box where the options range from zero to twelve but as I showed you when we go to safer web it ranges from zero to one hundred and it's just a different scale so I don't know if I could ask adobe every question that I've ever wondered about some of these things that would be that would be a fantastic experience but yeah it's just a different scale the sweet spot I guess really just kind of depends what you're doing so most the time when I'm making j pegs I'm saving them a twelve like it's always twelve if I'm sending them for print for whatever they're always twelve unless I've downsized it to send off as a proof or if I'm emailing a picture of my puppy to my friend or whatever then I'm going to save you know save it less and in that case I might drag it down to ten or maybe eight it just kind of depends on how big the file really is because usually this is what I'm doing if I've downsized it for webber for you know, email then I just want the file to just be small and get there so I would look at this and it would depend how big the file is maybe I would compress it more and just to make this number smaller if it's already a pretty small file then I probably would just stick with like ten I usually when I do down five that I usually go too late eight to ten probably I don't really ever go below that but you know that's just me I mean the important thing too to keep in mind is that everyone's needs are going to be a little bit different when it comes to everything in front of stop like file formats for one you know if you're doing video and all that kind of stuff that is like a whole other ball game, eh? So everyone's file format needs are going to be different but just in general in photo shop everyone uses it differently and so don't be afraid to experiment and and don't be afraid to ask teo, whatever. You know, whoever you're working with on different projects because they may have specific requests as well, can you explain the difference between baseline standard bistline? Oh, yes. Good stuff. Okay, so formatting options this has to do with the way that the file gets encoded, which is there is, like, so much technical stuff that happens, you know, we sort of just like we talked about the other day that we take funds for granted. We take file formats for granted. There is some complicated stuff that goes into building all these file formats, and some of that includes these formatting options. So baseline standard and baseline optimized and then progressive has to do with the way that the file gets saved and then rendered later. So, for example, progressive is going to like, if you save it, and this doesn't apply so much anymore for on high speed. Not not everyone, but a large part of the world is on high speed internet now, and so when you save it is progressive, that means that it would appear on the screen. It would render, like, line by line. Yeah, so this is kind of goes back to fifty six k dialect, dave, when instead of waiting for the whole image to load before it appears you would you could choose progressive, and so it would just appear line by line a little faster so that the user gets a sense that there's actually something coming and they don't just navigate away and then baseline standard and baseline optimize our very similar but optimized might have cem might be a higher quality, but it is also not going to be as supported online, so the default setting is baseline standard um and wonder, how are we getting? And yeah, the baseline. Sanders, actually a little bit larger than optimized optimize is going to be, as it sounds better, optimized for quality versus size, but if not a swell supporting in different browsers, so that's, always, you know, browser compatibility is always a big issue, and I'm married to a web developer who test these things all the time and knew he has his own opinions about which browser which browsers are good for all kinds of things, but let's see which one do you choose used? I leave it on standard yeah, and a lot of these things you'll notice that each of the file formats, I mean that's, why we didn't go through all of these little details, because a lot of them are just really so specific need, and, you know, for most of them, the default settings are going to really be ok until you have a problem with it or someone really request otherwise you can pretty much leave a lot of that kind of stuff where it sits so don't feel like you have teo, you know, tweak everything and how about full technical understanding of every aspect of that stuff would a jiff file format be best to publish images to the internet to protect your images from unapproved use? Oh that's a good question photographic elements I think we're instagram friends now that so that's you know that's a good question and that's a really I guess creative way of trying teo I guess protect your images from untended youth but I I don't think it would really protect you at all because it could still be used surprisingly even when you save let's let's to go back to this cab here. So this is photographic and if we were to save this for the web and we were to choose jeff so we are we're going to be limited now. Oh huge isn't it were limited in color e that's a big this is a big file I didn't downsize it now for web, but eso if we are saving it is a jiff were limited to two hundred fifty six colors, which is why we don't choose gifts for photographs but it's still I mean it's not like it renders that as a total nightmare you know if you printed it that would look pretty growth but on the web it's not a total nightmare which is why those cinema graphs that I mentioned earlier can get away with it because it's not terrible on a screen but you wouldn't choose it that way but it's not going to deter anybody from I mean it's not great for photos but it's not so bad that people are running away screaming but I don't think it would help you in that sense I'm sorry well thank you but good a good idea that the clever clever thought process like we will question from never give up I'm liking the class he says he'd love to know what your official answer teo eyes to the process of saving and loan rez versus high rez to give to clients. Oh so like how I present my files I guess well gosh, that is really a personal choice so when when my clients purchase their negatives or you know if they're when they're included in a package for example I give them copies exactly like I have on my system and that's just me but personally I think it's a hassle to try tio separate it out and in process I know it's simple yes to like patch it through bridge or whatever and just process everything to maybe a smaller file signs for clients but you know what? I don't want to be the only person on their planet responsible for their wedding photos for the rest of my life and that their fiftieth wedding anniversary is they have paid to have their digital files went them tow have them instead of trying to track me down to get a print because I will be on a beach somewhere who know so I like them if they're getting the digital files I am one hundred percent going all in and I'm giving them the files but I don't resize them if that was the question like I don't make them three hundred pixels prints or whatever I just straight up copy my files as I have them and I give it to them and and that works so everyone does that differently yeah what kind of a it's good to know how you do with those three so I don't know ok? Our friend dave chi piper in the u k asked is pdf the on ly file you can password protect oh uh that's a good question I would guess I can't think of another one off the top of my head but I'm not for certain on that you can password protect your pdf pdf they're really cool in that way khun dio a lot with them but off the top of my head I'm not sure of another format that lets you password protected so that's a good point that I didn't mention earlier, so thank you, yeah, we one more question. David appel asked light room for suggests using tiff instead of psc when sending to photo shop because it holds more color information. Is that correct? I wouldn't think like the psd format is the native format, so I would expect them to be equal, but I'm not above admitting that maybe I could be wrong, but I would expect them to be. I would accept them to be the same. Although tips well here, I guess this is true. Tiff can hold larger file formats than like a traditional psd only goes up, I think, to two gigs in size, whereas tips can go up to four. So if you cross the two gig mark in psd land, then you have to go to the psd big, the large format file, which is p f b, right, but tous can go up to four gig. So I guess if you're really working with a huge, high rez, hdr super, whatever, you know, bit image than perhaps.