Technical Tips

We thank Bob Cooper of ANU Photography for the following advice on digital camera settings:

As a minimum, we recommend that people set their cameras to produce JPG file format at the SHQ setting. This is the highest quality setting for JPG and can be selected in the menu of most point and shoot digital cameras. This will generally produce a file suitable for enlargement up to A4 depending on the camera.

Note that SHQ/JPG in one camera may produce a lower quality image than the same setting in another camera.

Preferably the cameras should be set to produce TIFF file format but not all cameras have that capability.

If shooting in TIFF format then the lowest TIFF setting will generally be adequate for your project although higher settings will always produce the best result.

The main difference between shooting in TIFF and shooting in JPG is that JPG looses a percentage of the pixels recorded by the camera. This produces an acceptable image and requires less space on the memory card but does reduce the quality especially if the file is edited on the computer.

Each time a JPG file is edited and then saved it looses a few more pixels.

TIFF files retain 100% of the pixels recorded and therefore produce a higher quality image. Also TIFF does not degrade when edited and saved again.

The down side with TIFF is that it requires the most space on the memory card and therefore gives you less shots on a given memory card.