Re: What is the best format to photograph in?

Frank Martin wrote:
I have been advised to use "tiff" for permanence but these files are very large indeed (eg 25mb each).

If you're not a professional photographer, you can
pretty well forget about TIFF format. Moderate
compression JPEG files (10:1 or less) do an excellent
job of preserving *relevant* photographic information
and are perfectly satisfactory for most needs.

Sometimes I have to take about 100 photos in a session, so this can result in storage problems.

Using .jpg format will cure your space problems.

Is it possible to take the photos in "jpeg" in the field, then download these to the computer, and THEN convert them all to "tiff"? Would this have the same effect?

No, once a picture is compressed with a lossy
compression method, the information cannot be
reconstituted. However, as noted above, unless
you have a truly unusual application, .jpg files
will preserve all the detail you want.

If you have doubts, try taking the same picture
saved as a .tif and as a .jpg, then display
them both side by side at 100% and see if the
differences are important. I think you'll find
that they are insignificant in almost every case.

Similarly, would it matter if I operated on the "tiff" files (rotating the image, photoshopping, adding typed annotations etc) and THEN converting to "tiff" for permanent storage?

Forget about .tif. First, never overwrite your
original .jpg files, so you can always start over
with the originally recorded detail.

Second, if you want to do separate "enhancement"
sessions in Photoshop, save the file in Photoshops
native .psd format--it retains everything, including
your layers, masks, history, etc.

Once you are satisfied with a photo and want to add
it to your "collection", save it as a moderately
compressed .jpg again (quality 8 or more in Photoshop).

Purists will argue that you should record everything
in TIFF or RAW mode, but if you're not a professional
photographer, this is gilding the lily.

-michael


Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."
.

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