So images from most cameras are stored in the JPEG format, and that is after all the in-camera processing is done to it. (what the camera sees has to be correct

So images from most cameras are stored in the JPEG format, and that is after all the in-camera processing is done to it. (what the camera sees has to be corrected for stuff like lens distortion, color as a human would see it, and has stuff like sharpening applied) Two major problems with this is that JPEG is a lossy format, and the original image that was captured by the camera had a lot more information that can be used. (for example raw images are often able to be used to save blown out highlights or shadows) So professional cameras offer a "raw" capturing mode which saves that information in its own format like DNG. (which itself is pretty much TIFF + metadata) These formats aren't widely supported outside of image editors though and require manual processing before they look good. RawDevJS [0] seems to be a browser-based editor for that and the author also released other repositories such as a tool that renders DNG in the browser and a command-line converter. [0]: http://rawdev.bergnet.org/ http://rawdev.bergnet.org/