Welcome to the Anthropics Knowledge Base
Picture File Formats
The Standard editions of our products support JPEGs, and TIFFs with 8 or 16 bits per color sample (24 or 48 bits per pixel). They can load in all of these formats and will always save in 8 bits per color sample.*
Studio and Studio Max editions also support reading most camera RAW file types. They will save tiff files with the same number of bits as the original file.
*All editions of Smart Photo Editor support RAW files and save tiff files with the same number of bits as the original file.
Studio and Studio Max editions also support reading most camera RAW file types. They will save tiff files with the same number of bits as the original file.
*All editions of Smart Photo Editor support RAW files and save tiff files with the same number of bits as the original file.
We use dcraw to decode RAW image files.
You can check your RAW files are supported using the free trial of the software.
If you find your particular RAW format is not decoded correctly, your alternative solution is to process your files into Adobe RAW using the free Adobe converter for this.
The Windows download is here
and Mac one here.
With this you can convert all of your RAW files into the common Adobe RAW DNG Digital Negative format. You will lose no information from the files in doing this, but the resulting DNG files will load into many more programs correctly including the Studio and Studio Max editions of the software.
If you find your particular RAW format is not decoded correctly, your alternative solution is to process your files into Adobe RAW using the free Adobe converter for this.
The Windows download is here
and Mac one here.
With this you can convert all of your RAW files into the common Adobe RAW DNG Digital Negative format. You will lose no information from the files in doing this, but the resulting DNG files will load into many more programs correctly including the Studio and Studio Max editions of the software.
JPEG is a "lossy" file format, which means the files can be much smaller than "lossless" formats such as TIFF. However, the smaller file size is at the expense of image quality.
When you save a JPEG file, you have a slider to control the "quality". Decreasing the quality will throw away some information about the image which will make it look worse, but this will also make the file size smaller. The JPEG file format is designed to throw away first the information which the eye is not very sensitive to, so for higher quality JPEGs you can barely tell the difference.
Note that even if the quality is set to maximum, the image quality will be very slightly degraded. Even though this may be imperceptible if you just save the image once, the quality losses will be multiplied each time you load and save the image. This means you should use TIFF files if you intend to make multiple changes to an image in different sessions or using different programs.
Also note that when you save a JPEG file with a low quality, the information is lost at that point so you cannot simply load back in the same JPEG file and save it out again with higher quality to improve the image.
When you save a JPEG file, you have a slider to control the "quality". Decreasing the quality will throw away some information about the image which will make it look worse, but this will also make the file size smaller. The JPEG file format is designed to throw away first the information which the eye is not very sensitive to, so for higher quality JPEGs you can barely tell the difference.
Note that even if the quality is set to maximum, the image quality will be very slightly degraded. Even though this may be imperceptible if you just save the image once, the quality losses will be multiplied each time you load and save the image. This means you should use TIFF files if you intend to make multiple changes to an image in different sessions or using different programs.
Also note that when you save a JPEG file with a low quality, the information is lost at that point so you cannot simply load back in the same JPEG file and save it out again with higher quality to improve the image.
The "save picture" option is for saving Jpeg and Tiff files that are industry standard, and this is the option to use so that the files will load into other programs.
If you save as a session you will be saving a project file specific to that program. This is useful if you want to continue editing the picture in the same software at a later time. These files will not open in other programs.
If you save as a session you will be saving a project file specific to that program. This is useful if you want to continue editing the picture in the same software at a later time. These files will not open in other programs.
We have used dcraw for decoding some RAW files, and we have slightly modified it so if you would like a copy of our dcraw source code please contact us through the ticket system.
The problem is due to the way Canon and Nikon sometimes encrypt some of the data in their RAW files. We are always improving our own decoding of RAW files but still have problems with some of the Canon and Nikon RAW data.
The solution is to process your RAW files into Adobe DNG using the free Adobe converter for this.
The Windows download is here
and Mac one here.
With this you can convert all of your RAW files into the common Adobe DNG Digital Negative format. You will lose no information from the files in doing this, but the resulting DNG files will load into many more programs correctly including the software's Studio and Studio Max editions.
The solution is to process your RAW files into Adobe DNG using the free Adobe converter for this.
The Windows download is here
and Mac one here.
With this you can convert all of your RAW files into the common Adobe DNG Digital Negative format. You will lose no information from the files in doing this, but the resulting DNG files will load into many more programs correctly including the software's Studio and Studio Max editions.