Beginner questions

[peaches]

Hi I'm a beginner photographer and I wanted to know what a good size and format to save my photos would be. I'm guessing a raw or tiff file but i have no idea on resolution. Thanks, and yes I did search before asking.

 

[Mike_E]

Welcome!


The best way imho is to save them just as they came out of the camera. Go ahead and save them to disk and use multi session to fill them with out wasting space.

Give some thought about a file system or what to group with what.

If you do any editing to them then you can save that into another disk.

mike

 

[peaches]

hmm well i guess what i really wanted to know was if you were going to submit photos in a somewhat professional manner what would be a good general size?

just professionally storing photos what is the average size used?

 

[Groupcaptainbonzo]

When you save your files save them as they came out of the camera RAW. When you submit them, ask what format they want, and while doing post production work on them alter the size/format et al, to what has been stipulated by the client. (Usually 50meg tiff but many have other preferences)

 

[Garbz]

My method: Record in RAW -> leave in raw while processing -> Finally save as a full size really high quality JPEG for storage.

The reason being that JPEGs are easier to handle, smaller in size, a common standard, and above all a top quality JPEG has exactly the same detail as RAW files but are a quarter of the size. But the key here is that all the invisible information that is lost when you save to JPEG is important for editing, which is why this step should be the very last step, only when you're sure you won't change the photo again. Subsequent changes will suffer a loss in quality unless you save in RAW TIFF PNG DNG or any other lossless 16bit format.

 

[deanimator]

If you start with RAW, and want to submit work to agencies for publication etc, contact the agency for their requirements.

My agent will not accept jpegs...in fact they want both the RAW and TIFF versions!

 

[peaches]

ok, thanks guys!

 

[Groupcaptainbonzo]

JPEG looses some detail even at top quality. Once lost you cannot regain this detail. Even if you change back to TIFF etc.
Store RAW. when needed, load into PhotoShop (or whatever) work on it. And send to customer in the format / size they require.
You keep the original RAW on file so that you can then use it again. you may need a monochrome version or a cropped version etc at a later date. If you keep the ORIGINAL RAW file you can do with it exactly what you want to. And come back later to do do something else.
VERY often a JPEG will not be accepted by a client.