Digital Copy Degradation

[Paul in OKC]

If you copy pictures from your camera to a CD, do you lose some picture quality? Every time you copy a picture and it goes to 2nd generation, 3rd generation, etc are you losing quality? Is it best to print directly from the CF card? If I print directly from the CF card, then copy the CF card to a CD, and then print from the CD, will I see any differance?

[Michael Fanelli]

If you copy pictures from your camera to a CD, do you lose some picture quality? Every time you copy a picture and it goes to 2nd generation, 3rd generation, etc are you losing quality? Is it best to print directly from the CF card? If I print directly from the CF card, then copy the CF card to a CD, and then print from the CD, will I see any differance?

Digital copies are just 0s and 1s. Unlike analog, there is no degradation when you copy a file no matter how many times you do it.

If you are using a lossy format such as jpgs, you lose quality every time you save an image after loading it into an image editing program. When editing, change the jpegs to a lossless format such as TIFF before you save any editing.

[another view]

Jpegs are the only files that I know of that have this problem. If you save any file, including a jpeg, from the camera to a CD you'll be OK. The problem comes when you edit the original and save it over and over. You could even re-save it two or three times and not even notice the difference as long as you're not trying to make a really big print and leave the quality level as high as you can.

In Photoshop, there are different quality levels the file can be saved at, from 1 to 12. I usually use 12 which still compresses the file a little, unless it's posting something on the web and that gets an 8.

The best alternative is to save that jpeg shot in the digital camera as a tiff file - save as many times as you want and it won't lose any data. However, the file sizes are huge.