question about output...

[fallia]

i'm putting together an adorama photo book online....whats better regarding output tiff. vs. jpeg.....any difference?

[kcoppock]

JPEG is a photo format that uses lossy compression. What that means is that you are going to suffer some degradation in image quality any time you save as a JPEG. The upside, of course, is that the file size is much smaller, so for displaying online, it's a pretty safe format to use. I've not used it, but I imagine Adorama would convert a TIFF to JPEG anyway if you uploaded one.

TIFF, on the other hand, is an uncompressed format, and is capable of saving layers as well as multiple pages (multiple pages is rarely supported, though; Photoshop doesn't even support it). The file sizes are going to be very large in comparison to JPEG, but for archival and high quality printing, it's what I would recommend.

[fallia]

thanks allot man, i always use JPEG but for no reason other than i'm lazy and uninformed

[Doug Sundseth]

The problem with .jpg images isn't that they're compressed, it's that the compression algorithm throws away information to get better compression. (The quality setting on the .jpg is what determines how much gets thrown away.)

The only time this matters at all is if you use a low quality setting or if you repeatedly change and save a .jpg image. Once the image is done for sure and you never intend to touch it again except for printing, .jpg works fine.

FWIW, .tif files can also be compressed. The standard algorithm is LZW, which is a lossless compression, and causes no image degradation regardless of how many times you use it.

[kcoppock]

Thanks Doug! Just realized I definitely didn't make that clear. Compression == good, lossy == not so good. :P

[HelenOster]

Originally Posted by fallia

i'm putting together an adorama photo book online....whats better regarding output tiff. vs. jpeg.....any difference?

You are most welcome to drop me an email if you need any help: Helen@adorama.com

[mshockley]

For me, I always do all my work starting from a RAW file and save a draft/copy when done processing as a TIF.

If you need to go back and do any editing you can use your TIF file without being destructive.

I also save the final image as a maximum quality jpeg, which it seems as though many printers ask for anyway. I do not ever edit these jpeg files.

If I decide to change something I either go back to the TIF or the RAW file, make my changes, save a new TIF file, then save it as a new max. quality jpeg.

[photog1107]

Ok, maybe I am missing something ... (and I don't mean to hijack the original thread with my own questions) but if someone like me is purely working in LR3 (which I do 90% of the time) is there any reason to save my edited file as a TIFF? Why can't I do my edits to the RAW file (in LR3) and then just output as jpg (either large or small files) for various uses? Does TIFF give you a significantly better output for printing compared to a large jpg? One is close to 80 MB, the other 7-8 MB. But the exif dimensions are the same for both files (in my case, they are 5184 X 3186).

I am trying to save file space on my computer and figure out the best organizational workflow for file saving and hard drive efficiency. I hate to save all those Raw files once I have edited them, but if I want to go back a year from now and print something, I want to make sure my quality is high enough for an 8x10 or perhaps a 11x14 print.

So I guess I have two questions: 1) Is TIFF preferable to large JPG for printing (given the same image dimensions) and 2) if large JPGs are indeed OK for printing, should I save all my original RAWs or conserve space and just keep my best-edited jpg for posterity?

Any help, feedback from the DPS community is greatly appreciated!

[kcoppock]

For most intents and purposes, JPG is fine. JPGs are compressed with a lossy compression algorithm. This means that every time you save a JPG, you're losing some quality. TIFFs are saved with either no compression, or a lossless form of compression (such as LZW). If you're just saving once, a high quality JPG will most likely be indistinguishable from a TIFF to the naked eye. If you plan to open and save it again, you're losing additional quality every time. That said, I'd probably just keep the RAWs and work from that. There are also additional benefits to TIFF, such as 16-bit support vs JPG's 8-bit.

[rosserx]

@ fallia> If I were to make a photo book, I would use Blurb.