Edit Photos in Jpeg or TIF

[spmakwana]

Hello,

I've some doubts. First I've a average camera Nikon L110 that capture only JPEG with average quality. I manage them in lightroom.
My workflow is do some lightroom adjustment and edit in different nik plug in on a copy of image.
Currently I'm doing JPEG copy. But my question is should I make a copy of my JPEG image to TIFF file to edit them in nik software? Because convert JPEG to TIF does not make much sense. I know the advantage of JPEG and TIF and lossy vs lossless image.

But the question is is it practical to convert some average camera JPEG file to TIF for editing? and storing them in TIF (which take huge space on hard disk also for some poor/average image quality)?

 

[Ido]

Every time you convert a file to JPEG, regardless of its original format, it compresses and throws out some data. With TIFF, you can choose to have no compression at all, then you retain any information you had to begin with.

The camera should have some settings you can play around with. Those would be different profiles/presets, such as Standard, Vivid, Muted, etc. Most cameras also have an option to tweak those presets with different saturation, sharpening, noise reduction, some even highlights/shadows adjustments. You should try to master and get good exposure in-camera instead of using Lightroom, because it's not a great idea to edit a JPEG file too drastically. You can do it sometimes, but usually you'll end up with a lot more noise and not so much color. Those settings in the camera are sort of like using Lightroom to edit raw files — it does the edits to the raw data.

That being said, the age-old line can be added here: if you're happy with what you get, and you don't see any problems with it, then just keep doing it.

 

[spmakwana]

Every time you convert a file to JPEG, regardless of its original format, it compresses and throws out some data. With TIFF, you can choose to have no compression at all, then you retain any information you had to begin with.

The camera should have some settings you can play around with. Those would be different profiles/presets, such as Standard, Vivid, Muted, etc. Most cameras also have an option to tweak those presets with different saturation, sharpening, noise reduction, some even highlights/shadows adjustments. You should try to master and get good exposure in-camera instead of using Lightroom, because it's not a great idea to edit a JPEG file too drastically. You can do it sometimes, but usually you'll end up with a lot more noise and not so much color. Those settings in the camera are sort of like using Lightroom to edit raw files — it does the edits to the raw data.

That being said, the age-old line can be added here: if you're happy with what you get, and you don't see any problems with it, then just keep doing it.

Yes camera have some options and preset but no so much. And as you said I tried to get the best shot out of the camera whenever it's possible, but sometime we have to edit JPEG file because my camera doesn't produce raw files.
Yes JPEG editing is not good and produce some noise but little adjustment is not so bad.

What I think is I make a TIFF copy and then make any edit as I want and then save final image as JPEG with lowest compression and delete TIFF file.

 

[Ido]

What I think is I make a TIFF copy and then make any edit as I want and then save final image as JPEG with lowest compression and delete TIFF file.

Sounds reasonable to me, other than you lose the progress you've made (that makes the edits destructive).

 

[Dao]

When the camera create the jpeg image, it throw away some data already. Let's say on a particular photo, it throw away 50% of the data. Now if you try to convert it to Tiff. That is just a 50% less data Tiff. No difference.

Since Lightroom (from what I understand) is non-destructive editing software regardless the source file format (RAW, JPEG or TIFF). So I do not think you need to worry about it too much about convert it to another format and edit the copy. Of course, you can make copies if you are intent to edit the files outside or from within LR.

 

[Ido]

When the camera create the jpeg image, it throw away some data already. Let's say on a particular photo, it throw away 50% of the data. Now if you try to convert it to Tiff. That is just a 50% less data Tiff. No difference.

Since Lightroom (from what I understand) is non-destructive editing software regardless the source file format (RAW, JPEG or TIFF). So I do not think you need to worry about it too much about convert it to another format and edit the copy. Of course, you can make copies if you are intent to edit the files outside or from within LR.

If I understood his situation correctly, he's editing the JPEG images in Lightroom non-destructively, and then he wants to edit them in any of the Nik Collection applications, which means Lightroom has to create a new file with the adjustments made in Lightroom. If that new file is a JPEG, the already-compressed file will be compressed again and more data, of the little there is left, will be thrown out. By saving it out as TIFF, every bit of data the original JPEG contains is preserved, in accordance to the edit in Lightroom.

 

[KmH]

The JPEG file type was designed to be a finished, ready-to-print file type that would not be edited.

The only data JPEG discards is color data. Every pixel is still there, but more on pixels below.

The camera records 16-bits of color data (a Raw file) - 16, 384 shades of color per color channel - or 4,398,046,511,104 shades of color.
JPEG can only use 8-bits of color - 256 shades of color per color channel - only 16, 777,216 shades of color.
There are 3 color channels - red, green, blue.

JPEG compression is accomplished by locking pixels into 8x8 px, 8x16 px, or 16x16 px groups known as Minimum Coded Units or MCU's.

Photo Editing Tutorials
JPEG - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Lossy compression - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia
Transform coding - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

The common JPEG image format is an example of a transform coding, one that examines small blocks of the image and "averages out" the color using a discrete cosine transform to form an image with far fewer colors in total.

 

[WayneF]

Converting to TIFF would seem pointless if using Lightroom, since Lightroom already does lossless editing on JPG.

Otherwise (other regular editors), converting to TIF will not improve the original image (it still has all the original JPG artifacts in it), but TIF would not create any more additional JPG artifacts at every save as TIF, not until the last one final output as JPG. So that is a plus then.

But Lightroom already works that way (lossless edits). Any edits do NOT change the actual data, it only saves a list of edits. Any subsequent edits only revises the list of edits, but never the data. Then when ready, THEN you output one final new JPG for other programs to see the edits. At that time, then it edits a copy with the change list (one time, from original image), and also outputs only the one new additional set of JPG artifacts. But no shifting the data back and forth with subsequent edits.

If other programs looked at the actual edited JPG file, they don't know how to see and use the edit list, so they always just see the original image. So from Lightroom, we must output a new revised JPG for other programs to see. This new JPG copy is a temporary thing - if we desire additional edits, we discard the temporary JPG output, and do our edit, and output a new JPG copy.

If you did create a TIF copy, and edited it in Lightroom, it is also lossless editing, meaning you still have to output a new temporary copy for other programs to see the edits.

Concept is Lossless Edits, it is modern, and a pretty big deal. Another big advantage is that any time in the future, you can simply delete your edits, and see the original pristine image again. The actual original is never changed. It is a Raw file tool, but Adobe Camera Raw (Lightroom, Photoshop, Elements) uses it for JPG and TIF files too (the Raw editor does).

 

[Dao]

When the camera create the jpeg image, it throw away some data already. Let's say on a particular photo, it throw away 50% of the data. Now if you try to convert it to Tiff. That is just a 50% less data Tiff. No difference.

Since Lightroom (from what I understand) is non-destructive editing software regardless the source file format (RAW, JPEG or TIFF). So I do not think you need to worry about it too much about convert it to another format and edit the copy. Of course, you can make copies if you are intent to edit the files outside or from within LR.

If I understood his situation correctly, he's editing the JPEG images in Lightroom non-destructively, and then he wants to edit them in any of the Nik Collection applications, which means Lightroom has to create a new file with the adjustments made in Lightroom. If that new file is a JPEG, the already-compressed file will be compressed again and more data, of the little there is left, will be thrown out. By saving it out as TIFF, every bit of data the original JPEG contains is preserved, in accordance to the edit in Lightroom.

Since I am not familiar with the Nik plugin, I really cannot comment on that. However, if I need to edit the photo in PS (which is destructive) from within LR, LR will create a TIFF backup image for me (or at least ask me is it okay to create that file for me), so all edits will be saved on the copy instead.

If edit the image in Nik plugin from within LR behave the same as edit the image with PS in LR, then I think creating a Tiff file automatically by LR is fine.

 

[spmakwana]

Thank you guys for your opinions. Those helped very much.