answer:If you can, set your camera so that it stores the photos in a RAW format. Think of all the information your cameras takes in as a recipe and all the ingredients for a specific dish. What the camera’s computer will do is make the dish, and discard what it doesn’t think is important or needed, thus resulting in a JPEG file. These are much, much smaller, but yes, you do lose a lot of information. RAW format allows you to decide what is important, making the editing process easier. The only downside is that they are considerably larger then JPEG (I believe roughly ten times larger from what I recall). It’s worth it though, especially if you think in terms of the Las Vegas analogy. Let’s say working with a JPEG is like going to Vegas with $300 bucks, and a RAW is like going with $3000. You gamble a little and lose 100$. Well, when you’ve got a small amount of money to play with, that’s a huge chunk. But when you came with 3000$, losing 100$ isn’t as big of a deal. The same goes with editing photos; even minor edits can cause you to lose a lot of data with a JPEG. While you will still lose data when making alterations to the RAW, your overall photo will still be largely intact (compared to the JPEG, anyway). As for what to save the photo as when you’re done… well, that all depends. I generally save my images as PNGs because they tend to be smaller in size then JPEGs. But you should, as a rule of thumb, always keep a copy of the original image as well as a PSD of the edits you’ve made so you can go back and have a reference of the work you’ve done. I would also recommend Adobe Lightroom. I absolutely love it to death because it allows me to make edits quickly and easily as well as making it a breeze to organize.