Difference between Lossless and Lossy Image Format As the name suggests, lossless compression is lossless. In fact, this is a pretty much a contradiction. Lossless JPEG format isn't inherently lossless. The best lossless format is still the original image on which the compression came from. When compression happens, it's usually the only source to be utilized. There doesn't exist a real world example of lossless compression which works with each and every image, however. This is where other image formats come to the rescue. In fact, the most popular compression formats such as JPEG are not lossless. JPEG's compression is just a method and not necessarily a method that is perfect. Many formats are lossy because they use one of many algorithms that may not work with your image exactly. For example, PNG is based on the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) format, which is a lossless format, but also a bit complicated. So far, we said in this article that image compression is like a dance of a ball and the steps of which can be very complex. In fact, this topic is discussed in detail in this article. Image formats like GIF are still used widely even today. With images, compression is done to be easy and efficient. We always need to keep in mind that the quality of the image isn't the most important thing, and compression is only done under certain constraints. For example, JPEG uses a color data format (CBR) which is a bit complicated and can't always be compressed for all images; JPEG compression is a method that sometimes causes artifacts in the image, but which works well for some image types. Also, there exist more types of JPG compression algorithms that are good when it comes to particular images in particular situations. To understand more detail about image compression, we'll have to look at how to understand and understand how compression works with images in the next article of this series. If you are a developer, and you don't know that you can use a certain tool for generating JPEG or whatever compression format, and it works with your images, here's a good blog post about that topic : If you want to be a true professional in image compression, you need to understand the principles of image compression, which you can find all over the internet in articles written by professionals, and apply for patents if you want.