CodedColor PhotoStudio Manual - digital photo software, picture viewer, image editor, page layouter and flash / pdf album exporter (similar ACDSee, IrfanView)

Lossless rotation

Lossless rotation is a very important new feature of CodedColor. Since JPEG is the standard image format for digital cameras, and since most of your image editing is reduced to simple rotation, this feature ensures that your images will not experience quality loss anymore. You can rotate an image as many times as you wish, without loosing any pixel information. Not all image applications support lossless rotation yet, so make sure to check this before doing any rotations outside of CodedColor. In all other editing cases, you should avoid saving your changes to the original JPEG file, as you will loose quality for every Open / Save combination!

To understand more about JPEG compression and quality loss, read this short essay from Bob Johnson, an award winning photopgrapher:

JPEG files are by far the most common image format used to display photography on the web and for good reason. The JPEG format does a far better job of retaining color fidelity than the GIF format. Because of the compression scheme used by JPEG, continuous-tone images, such as photos can be a lot smaller than GIFs. It's not uncommon for JPEGs to compress 20:1. Photos stored as GIFs can only compress at or near 5:1. The GIF format does work better for line art and graphics with large single-color areas.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that JPEG is a lossy compression algorithm. That means that every time you save a JPEG, you are losing information in the process. Open a JPEG more than once, tweak something, then resave it and the loss gets even worse. Do it a third, fourth or fifth time, and it gets worse still. The file sizes will still be about the same, but the images will look worse each time.

How do you get out of this vicious cycle? Never open a JPEG, edit it and resave it as a JPEG. Instead, always save your new image in the PSD, TIFF, or other native raw format. After this, you can re-save as a JPEG. The JPEG is your original you say? Before you do anything else, save it in some lossless format (such as PSD or TIFF) and now you can pretend that that file is your original.

Related topics

Rotating Pictures

CodedColor PhotoStudio by 1STEIN is a Windows photo viewer and editor to organize, edit, resize, reformat, correct, compare, sort, watermark, annotate and print digital images, and to edit EXIF and IPTC data in digital photos. You can rename multiple images, remove scratches, create panorama pictures (stitch), convert RAW photos (from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc. cameras), send images via Skype, send photo SMS, burn digital watermarks, correct colors, run a screenshow, convert and correct JPEG images in a batch process, rename fields, open pictures and image folders from the Explorer, generate a webalbum in HTML and compress JPG images. The CodedColor full version is not free, but during registration you can choose the Freeware edition, in which some functions are deactivated. After the download you can try the PhotoStudio shareware for 30 days without any restrictions. The CodedColor software interface looks very similar to ACDSee, is easier to use than Photoshop and more versatile than Picasa and Irfanview, but still contains editing and correction features as effective as Paintshop. Have a look at our Before / After tutorials, in order to get an idea of the powerful editor capabilities. The software comes with a detailed handbook and a fast database to store EXIF / IPTC data and color informationen. CodedColor PhotoStudio is a powerful and versatile photo organizer and image editing software for digital camera users. The user friendly interface includes features like photo editing & printing, web & flash album galleries, slide shows, photo management & cataloging, custom sorting, IPTC & EXIF editor and display, GPS tagging, perspective correction, barrel distortion, effects, thumbnail generation, resize & resample images, jp2000, batch conversion, database keyword searching, red eye removal, color / sharpness / brightness & contrast correction, artefacts removal, clone brush, scanner & TWAIN import, screen capture, lossless JPEG rotation, transparency (alpha channel), gamma correction, print ordering and screenshows with many transition effects, watermark text, image annotations, panorama stitch & animation, video capture, PDF album export, photo layouts, collages, frames, shadows, histograms, automatic white balance, skype photo sharing, etc. Opens and converts all common image formats: BMP, WMF, GIF, JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, PCX, PNG, PSP, PSD, PCD, and all current RAW formats. Visit the CodedColor FotoStudio homepage to learn more and download a free copy! Includes BYNGO MMS messenger and CodedColor Publisher, a versatile photo layout and DTP tool, from which you can order individual photobooks through KODAK.