File sizes and image quality

[Jon Haines]

Hello,

I'm new to Affinity Photo and am working my way through the tutorial videos etc.

Independent of Affinity Photo, I understand the difference between RAW and JPEG files in terms of image quality, post processing actions and resultant file sizes.

But what exactly is going on with image quality and file size when I open a RAW file (Canon .CR2), develop it without making any changes and then save it as an Affinity Photo file?

Thanks, Jon Haines.

[John Rostron]

If you save as a 16-bit image, then you will not be losing any quality. All that the development will do is to map the array of photosensor information (usually a Bayer array) to those image pixels we all know and love. Depending on your setup, it may also apply a gamma curve (which will change the shape of the histogram but will not lose any image quality).

John