PSD - If you work in Photoshop, and you should be if you aren’t, then you may already know that PSD is a Photoshop file format, and is without a doubt your best option when working on your digital image files. This is so mainly for two reasons: PSD allows the user to work inlayers and save their work without having to compress the files. While this of course results sin large files, but is a time-saver and makes it very easy to work on an ongoing project. Secondly, PSD files will not lose image quality as there is no compression taking place causing the image to lose data. It’s usually best to save you image in PSD until it is finished and then you can choose another file format that would be more appropriate for your project.

JPEG - JPEG, which means Photographic Experts Group, is perhaps the most well-known of the image file formats. JPEG files are very common for use on the Web, and can be used for a number of different applications due to their small file size. One drawback is that when JPEG images are altered, and then compressed again, they lose data, and hence, quality.

GIF - or Graphics Interchange Format, is another very popular image file format, mainly for use on the Web or various other internet applications. GIF files are usually very small, and because of this they load very quickly (compared to other file types) GIF files have a drawback as well, in that they are only able to render 256 colors.

TIFF - which stands for Tagged Image File Format, are much higher quality images but have not caught on because of their size and other factors.

These four types are the ones you will encounter most in your Photoshop editing, and you may end up using a combination of several of them, with PSD, JPEG and GIF carrying the bulk of the load.

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