What format and colour space are the nature images? – Cheap Nature Images

Every download is a JPEG, RGB, tagged sRGB, encoded at a quality where compression artefacts are invisible at 100 per cent magnification.

Why JPEG

Universal support, embedded colour profile, and at high quality visually identical to lossless at a fraction of the size. For continuous-tone photographs, which is the entire catalogue, nothing is gained by shipping anything larger.

Why not TIFF. Once an image has been encoded once, a TIFF preserves nothing that was not already lost and multiplies the file size by five. It matters for scans and for files that will be re-encoded many times; it does not matter for a delivered stock photograph.

Why not PNG. PNG is a graphics format. It is lossless because it is designed for flat colour and hard edges, which is the opposite of a photograph. On a nature image it produces an enormous file with no visible benefit whatsoever. People request it because lossless sounds better, and it is genuinely the wrong tool here.

Why not WebP or AVIF as the download. Because you should encode those yourself, at the exact dimensions you will display, from the original. Shipping you a pre-compressed modern format would force our compression choices onto your layout.

Why sRGB

Every browser, phone and social platform assumes sRGB when a file arrives without a profile. Delivering a wider gamut looks better in an editor and worse everywhere else, because the extra saturation is silently clipped by anything that ignores profiles.

For nature subjects this is almost never limiting. Foliage, rock, water, sand and sky sit comfortably inside sRGB. The exception is a saturated sunset, where deep orange and magenta approach the boundary.

Preparing for print

Convert to CMYK once, at the end, using the profile the printer supplies. Never on import.

Two predictable shifts: saturated warm colour pulls back, and deep shadow blocks up more than it does on a backlit screen. Lifting the darkest quarter-tones slightly before conversion usually solves the second entirely.

Preparing for the web

Never upload the original. Resize to the largest width you actually display, export WebP or AVIF with a JPEG fallback, and serve a responsive set with a sizes attribute.

Tune the quality to the smoothest area in the frame. Sky gradients band long before foliage does, so a frame that is mostly sky needs a higher setting than a frame that is mostly forest.

Metadata

Title, description, keywords and the asset id travel in the IPTC fields. Layout applications read them, which makes it far easier to work out later which image ended up where. Nothing identifies you or your purchase.