Digital photos are a grid of picture elements, or pixels. Most digital photos are made up of millions of pixels. Pixels are tiny sections of color that together form a photograph. Each pixel is made up of three values - red, green and blue, or RGB. This RGB information is used to determine the color of each pixel. In a 24-bit color image, each of these RGB values is made up of 8 bits; 8 bits - red, 8 bits - blue, and 8 bits - green, for a total of 24 bits. Each 8-bit value has 256 possibilities, ranging from 0 to 255. Typically, digital photos are saved as JPEG or TIFF files. These files simply contain the grid and RGB values for all the pixels in the image.
 
Note: For our Scanning Services, we scan your materials as JPEG files. If you wish your materials to be scanned in some other format, please let us know during the ordering process. (Please see the discussion on JPEG Versus TIFF.) For other photo and image, video and animation and audio formats we support, please click here.