Windows freeware to lock in a 3: or 4:3 aspect ratio for cropping

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Well, I'm not sure if PNG can be lossless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics
Portable Network Graphics is a raster graphics file format
that supports lossless data compression.


| (Actually, I'm not sure if
| JP[E]G can; I know the quality slider in IrfanView can be pushed up to
| 100%, but I think that still involves some loss.)

Yes. It's not 100%. It's just an arbitrarily standardized
scale of 0-100. Or sometimes 100-0. (In some
programs I might save at 85 while in others at 15.)

I have limited experience with photography,
but I have got into RAW images. Better cameras
seem to offer TIF format for images. The best offer
RAW. Very interesting stuff. It somehow records
the sensor data rather than pixels. So you can
push and pull the data to what you need before
reducing it to pixels. The first time I tried it, I
took a picture of a cyclamen in a dimly lit room.
I was able to pull out acurate green and magenta hues
color in RAW. If it had been JPG or TIF I would have
only been able to get brighter pinkish greys instead
of magenta.