The alphabet soup of file extensions is confusing.

Hi-Tech Studio: File Format Decoder Ring


The alphabet soup of file extensions is confusing. In this brief article, we show you the differences and similarities of the most common formats.

RAW

CR2, CRW
NEF
ORF
RW2
SR2, SRF, ARW
X3F
DNG

Various Compressed And Uncompressed Formats

GIF
JPEG
JPEG 2000
PNG
PSD
PSB
TIFF

In addition to the variety of image file formats photographers may have to contend with, there’s an entire category of “files about files” that you may run across. Here are some of the more common among them:


XMP. "An eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) file contains metadata information about a RAW capture and generally is referred to as a “sidecar” file because it has the same base filename as the RAW capture and sits beside that file. Photographers generally will experience an XMP file as containing RAW conversion information about the RAW capture."

Bridge Cache
Catalog. Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture