An overview of file formats - Lightroom Tutorial

- [Instructor] Lightroom supports a variety of file formats for editing, shown here in this list. In the course I demonstrate with a variety of these formats, mostly my own camera raw files and iPhone raw DNGs with a handful of stock jpeg images, too. You can follow along with any of the file types shown here. Let's review the supported file formats so that you understand what they are. Camera raw files are the preferred format for high quality professional editing. All high end professional digital cameras and many consumer point and shoot ones capture images in camera raw format. Camera raw is an uncompressed and unprocessed format containing the exact data captured by the camera sensor. Each brand of camera captures its own camera raw format, and therefor the files have different file extensions. Here are the file extensions for some of the larger camera brands. Digital negative, or DNG is a publicly available archival format for raw files generated by digital cameras. DNG is non proprietary, ensuring that you can access your camera raw files in the future. Lightroom mobile captures photos in the DNG format. Jpeg format is lossy compressed image data without transparency. Jpeg images may come from stock photo sites, digital cameras and mobile phone cameras. Currently, jpeg is the only format that Lightroom can export directly to. PNG format supports lossless compression. PNG images are often created for web graphics because unlike jpeg, PNG can include transparency. HEIC, or high efficiency images are similar to jpegs, but use newer compression technology that captures high quality images at about half the size of a jpeg. Newer iOS cameras capture in the HEIC format. PSD is Photoshop's native file format. A PSD may contain layers, alpha channels and more. Although you can edit Photoshop files in Lightroom, I don't recommend doing it. And this is because most likely your Photoshop files contain layers, and Lightroom does not recognize layers. If you edit a layered file in Lightroom, the edits are applied to a flattened version of it. You can't have both the layers and Lightroom edits. TIFF format provides industry standard compatibility for non Adobe image editing software. TIFFs can be saved from Photoshop or other image editing applications. TIFF format supports the same layered content as Photoshop, so if your TIFF images contain layers, I don't recommend using Lightroom to edit them. CMYK isn't actually a file format, it's a color space used for commercial offset printing. Lightroom can work with your CMYK files, but adjustments are output and performed in the RGB color space, so I don't recommend editing CMYK files with Lightroom. Finally, Lightroom supports the import and editing of multiple video file formats. However, you may encounter limitations, depending on operating system, format and codex installed on your computer. And this course does not cover working with video. So that's it for the tech-y stuff. The most important thing to know is that if you can add a photo to Lightroom, you can follow this course to edit it.