If you imagine the picture as a grid of pixels, rotating 90 degrees is just swapping rows and columns with no loss to any pixel. Your edits will of course affect the image as desired, including rotating the picture. viewing the image) will not get back exactly the same image that existed prior to saving as a JPG, but now you are looking at it and potentially editing it as uncompressed pixels. **Now we begin to get close to your actual question** The raw processing can be done outside the camera, but that's not important here. Generally, all of the above takes place in your camera in a fraction of a second. The details are not important other than understanding that certain kinds of detail are lost in the compression. JPG achieves this by what's called 'Lossy Compression'. JPG creates a very high degree of compression to save space. There are may choices, but the key one here for your question is JPG. Now you need a format to save your picture. (The actual process is not this linear, but conceptually this works.) All of this will result in some loss, but the result is generally considered to be an improvement (if done correctly).Īt this point you have a good digital picture in memory. This digital image is almost always 'Sharpened', and exposure adjusted. Processing this data into a picture involves decisions and adjustments in how the individual sensor elements will be merged to form pixels and that will lose a bit, but this is unavoidable. The RAW sensor data is your starting point.

Let's look at the question slightly differently as: **Where does Digital Loss Occur?**

Rotate image exiftool