TIF or JPEG?

[neeleymartin]

TIF or JPEG? i read that TIF can be editted repeatedly with no loss of quality. why wouldn't i use it? i hope to move to RAW once i get my camera technique down. not ready for too much new at once.

thanks, neeley

 

[Unimaxium]

You're right about being able to open TIFFs multiple times and not lose quality. TIFF is what's called a "lossless" compression format, which means it does not discard any of the original image data. JPEGs will throw away a bunch of extra data that viewers are unlikely to notice, in order to make the image size smaller. This means that if you try to go back and edit a JPEG image, the image won't look as good as if you had edited a TIFF (although depending on how much you do to it, this might or might not be perceptible). The downside to TIFFs is that they take up a LOT of disk space compared to JPEGs. So it's really up to you whether you want to go for tip-top image quality, or if you want to conserve your hard drive space.

 

[D-50]

If you have the ability to shoot in RAW definately do, it will just afford you more options when it comes to editing. You can always save a raw file into a Tiff.

 

[Tiberius]

If you have RAW available, I'd shoot in it. Nikon's RAW files are compressed (and I would imagine Canon's are too, but I haven't used one to verify this), which translates to the RAW files from my camera being often 1/6 the size of a TIFF file while containing more data.