Image Formats: JPG, PNG, TIFF, EXR

Image Formats: JPG, PNG, TIFF, EXR

In VFX, choosing the right image format can make or break your pipeline. Each format has different strengths and weaknesses, and using the wrong one can cost you quality, storage space, or even make certain effects impossible. The four most common formats you will encounter are JPG, PNG, TIFF, and EXR, and they serve very different purposes.

JPG is the format everyone knows from their phone camera. It uses lossy compression, which means it throws away some image data to make the file small. This is great for sharing previews and watching dailies, but terrible for compositing. Every time you save a JPG, you lose quality. Banding, blocky artifacts, and crushed blacks are all signs of over compressed JPGs. Never use JPG as a working format in VFX.

PNG uses lossless compression, so it preserves all the original quality. It also supports transparency through an alpha channel. PNG is excellent for holding elements like rendered logos, UI graphics, and masks that need to stay crisp. The downside is that PNG files are larger than JPGs, and they only support 8-bit per channel, which means they cannot store the high dynamic range data needed for modern rendering.

TIFF is a flexible format that supports multiple bit depths, layers, and compression options. It can store 16-bit and even 32-bit float data, making it suitable for high quality work. Many scanning and texture workflows use TIFF because it preserves detail well. However, TIFF files can be very large, and not all software handles every TIFF variant correctly. It is a solid intermediate format but has largely been replaced by EXR in modern pipelines.

EXR, or OpenEXR, was developed by Industrial Light and Magic specifically for VFX. It supports 32-bit floating point pixels, multiple layers in a single file, arbitrary channels, and lossless or lossy compression. This means you can store beauty, depth, normals, and material ID passes all in one file. EXR is the industry standard for rendering and compositing. If you want high dynamic range data with broad software support, EXR is the format to use.