Question about zipping photos

marygrace

I was wondering if anyone can help me with this question: What affect, if any, might there be if I zip up some of my RAW images? Will I lose quality? Just wondering since I don't think I've ever seen any threads on this.

Thanks in advance!

gubbs

sorry I don't know, try it with copies and see.
I am not sure if they'll compress at all though

mercphoto

Compressing raw

marygrace wrote:

I was wondering if anyone can help me with this question: What affect, if any, might there be if I zip up some of my RAW images? Will I lose quality? Just wondering since I don't think I've ever seen any threads on this.

Thanks in advance!

Well, you won't lose any quality, because compression schemes meant for archiving are lossless, which means you get back all the data you started with when you uncompress. This is not true of lossy compression schemes, such as JPEG and MPEG.

But I don't know if you will save much space doing so. On Canon's at least the RAW file out of the camera is already compressed (in a lossless manner). So it won't get much smaller. It might actually get a wee bit bigger.