What’s New

It is Autumn once again and Guilderland residents know what that means; random power outages! If you are working on your computer when the daily outage strikes you know how devastating that can be. Lost work, lost time, and maybe computers that are messed up and need repair.

The traditional advice is to save your work regularly. However, if you are working on photographs you may not be aware that periodic saving of JPG files can cause degradation of the images. The reason for this is that image files in the JPG format (Joint Photographers Experimental Group) is a “lossey” format. This means that the data in the file is compressed and some is lost. Generally, you can control the level of compression. Web designers use this feature to adjust the file size and download time of the images they use on their sites.

The problem is that every time you save a JPG file you will degrade it as it is compressed. Depending on the settings the degradation can be very small or quite large. If you are concerned about power outages you will save your file every few minutes. If you do that you will loose data each time. The quality of your image will eventually become quite poor.

There are several solutions to this problem. One is to avoid saving, but that could mean, for Guilderland residents, the risk of your file going to the great beyond when the power goes out. A better option is to save the file in a lossless format, such as TIF, and then convert it to JPG as the very last step.

PowerPoint users know that the common practice is to open a photo in the program, save it as a Photoshop file (with the filename extension of PSD), do the necessary editing, and then save it at the very end as a JPG file. Many photographers will save the photo as an archive file in PSD format in case they want to further edit it later.

In case you haven’t heard about this, here is an official announcement:
October 31-Worshop Three: Market Presenters-Kate Baker for SUNY SBDC tells about market research, customers, marketing plans and more. Liz Calandrino, Peachtree Communications, talks about internet and interactive Web 2.0 Marketing, and Roger Lipera, owner, Lipera Web Design, talks about the necessity of a webpage and SEO. Kathy Burbank, GCC Director will give an overview of community chambers.