Just completed Block 3 Part 3 section 4, concerning fundamentals about graphics file format colour depth and compression. Being something of a (lapsed) amateur photographer, these are things that you learn about fairly thoroughly (with the exception of the overview of techniques used in lossy/lossless compression). If you don't, you end up running out of space very quickly (trying to keep everything as raw or uncompressed BMP files, or with a lot of small and poor quality over-compressed files. Trial and error, the best way to learn anything where a small mistake isn't likely to involve a death!
Here's a photo of a lizard taken in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England (August 2009). The original is stored as a TIF file with LZW compression - which does little to reduce its size. I'd like to store photos as PNGs, as the lossless compression is better, but for some reason PNG files do not retain any EXIF data (data such as date and time, camera model, lens focal length, aperture size, etc.). That's an horrendous oversight, and is perhaps one reason why PNG hasn't become more widespread.
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