Eli5 the difference between JPG, PNG, DNG, and TIF?

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So I know the basics and enough to get by but I don’t really understand the whole (8bit/16bit/32bit depth) and I also don’t really understand ppi/dpi when it comes to the fact that my camera shoots at 240 ppi but I can upscale it to 300 ppi or higher with Photoshop would that make any difference in photo quality? Thanks!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

So 8/16/32 bit is the “size” of a pixel in storage. Bigger number means greater granularity in colors. Imagine an [analog color spectrum](https://www.google.com/search?q=color+spectrum&oq=color+spectrum&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQABiABDIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIHCAcQABiABDIHCAgQABiABDIHCAkQABiABDIHCAoQABiABDIHCAsQABiABDIHCAwQABiABDIHCA0QABiABDIHCA4QABiABNIBCDI5NTZqMGo0qAIAsAIA&client=ms-android-oneplus-rvo3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8&chrome_dse_attribution=1#vhid=tpxjr34UUcr77M&vssid=l) across a rectangle. If you cut it in 8 segments and make each segment a single color (eg using the exact color at the midpoint of that segment) you can now represent every color in 3 bits. If you and one bit you get 16 segments, and twice as many possible color values and so on

For PPI, this is more about pixel density. More pixels per inch means less “loss” in the analog to digital conversion. Upscaling is using software to increase the pixel density (basically the computer spreads the captured pixels out and fills in the gaps). It can improve image quality but ymmv. It’s only really useful if you need to crop a segment

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