JPEG & TIFF FILE FORMATS ?

table1349 · Aug 12, 2013

manaheim said:
Gavjenks said:

No, not just an opinion. Nobody has as of yet offered a single valid reason why RAWs are superior for storage in any way whatsoever.

Sparky said "because they don't store metadata," but they do. Even more metadata than any RAW formats I'm aware of do in the case of DNGs and TIFFs.
Some other people said "because they don't degrade your images" but neither does any other lossless format (like PNG or DNG or TIFF).
Some other people said "because you want to store the full 12-16 bits of original sensor data," but this is easily accomplished by any common format above 8 bits (like PNGs or DNG or TIFFs again...)

Yet they offer numerous disadvantages. Such as higher likelihood of not being supported, less community usage and thus interest in reviving or protecting them, inability to save in those formats (thus they can only store unedited photos usually), lack of as much flexibility in what kind of metadata or compression is available, fewer programs that can edit them natively, multiple different formats to juggle if you happen to own more than one type of camera that don't share RAW formats, etc.

Zero advantages + At least one disadvantage = objectively worse option.

The only possible advantage seems to so far be "RAW happens to be what is right in front of my nose, so I don't have to bother thinking about any other alternatives." Which isn't really an actual technical advantage of a format.

Click to expand...

Gee... 58 posts in this thread. I wonder why.

Perhaps this would shed some light on your question. :mrgreen:

Gavjenks · Aug 12, 2013

Like I agreed already... its unlikely to be an issue for most people. You will probably still be able to open your d100 files well into the future. Especially if you keep old operating systems etc.

But "probably good enough" is not the same as "best." You COULD have all the same data taking up no extra space WITHOUT having to have bothered keeping any old hardware or software on hand.

And the car analogy is just bizarre. JPEGs and TIFFs are standard, thousands of times, possibly millions of times more popular and well established. THOSE are the gasoline cars. Raw files by comparison are about on the level of weird limited edition lime green motorcycles that run on watermelon juice. And youre buying five of them. But its okay because you also filled up your whole garage with a stockpile of spare melon bike parts to be safe!

RacePhoto · Aug 13, 2013

SCraig said:
If you want them as high-quality as possible then JPEG is not the way to obtain that. First off, JPEG is primarily a compressed format which in and of itself denotes a loss of fidelity. Secondly, JPEG is an 8-bit format whereas most cameras today are using 12-bit or 14-bit formats. Uncompressed TIFF or DNG would be a much better choice if you want a common image format. My personal preference is RAW for all of my images.

Cart before horse. Worrying about best save format and "degradation" is odd when you have asked about an S100 camera.

Not being a snob or anything, but unless you are already shooting an APS-C or larger sensor, the whole concept of file type, is academic. You can shoot JPG open as that and save as TIFF, edit and save, then save as JPG without much trouble. You have a TIFF file to edit later if you choose.

What you have to work with to start with, from a smaller sensor, isn't that important. It's like asking what kind of film to use in an Instamatic camera, with a plastic lens. Or how to save best image files from a camera phone, what format. It's not there and never will be, so don't worry. Until you have a large sensor and the best lenses, all the details are like putting racing tires on a VW beetle. It's still a VW beetle.

Plus JPEG is just fne and doesn't get worse with age, only with opening and editing and saving again. Repeated saves is the issue, not the original image.

Worry more about lighting and composition.

manaheim · Aug 13, 2013

Gavjenks said:
Like I agreed already... its unlikely to be an issue for most people. You will probably still be able to open your d100 files well into the future. Especially if you keep old operating systems etc.

But "probably good enough" is not the same as "best." You COULD have all the same data taking up no extra space WITHOUT having to have bothered keeping any old hardware or software on hand.

And the car analogy is just bizarre. JPEGs and TIFFs are standard, thousands of times, possibly millions of times more popular and well established. THOSE are the gasoline cars. Raw files by comparison are about on the level of weird limited edition lime green motorcycles that run on watermelon juice. And youre buying five of them. But its okay because you also filled up your whole garage with a stockpile of spare melon bike parts to be safe!

Ok, you said it yourself. It's unlikely to be an issue for most people. Done and done.

pixmedic · Aug 13, 2013

why ya'll arguing over storage? really? storage?
with terabyte hard drives so cheap now, and large capacity memory cards getting cheaper by the day, who cares what format you store it in?
hell, store every picture in every format you can possibly save it in starting from your raw file and working your way down to jpeg. that way, you have every possible scenario covered, and always have the "best" file saved for any conceivable reason you might need that particular format 50 years from now when you absolutely NEED the highest possible quality photo of that flower you took back in college. Everyone has a dozen 2 terabyte HD's linked up in a raid array down in their basement nowdays anyway, so who cares?

sheesh...its like people that put 87 octane gas in their car when the CLEARLY should be using the obviously better 93 octane.

Dao · Aug 13, 2013

I will continue store RAW until something change in the future. The word standard really means nothing in future technology. You can store JPEG or TIFF since you think that is the standard now. Floppy were one time as a standard, most people use that as a tool to store stuff in the past. Backup important data on it as well.

The best format for me to store my photos now is RAW because it contains all the information. And space is really not an issue, at least for me. I store 2 copies at home and save one copy at work. Of course, SATA or USB may advance to newer standard in the future, but it does not mean they will disappear in seconds. I will worry about that in the future.

So if Canon or Nikon decides to quit camera business in the future, it also doesn't mean RAW support will disappear in seconds. I strongly believe I have time to convert them if needed. Maybe I'll die before that they quit. When was the last Canon FD mount lens made? I still see FD to EOS adapter for sale right at this second.

Kolia · Aug 13, 2013

Lol,

It's a good thing to realize you are arguing with a teacher who, like many teacher before him, firmly believes he is right.

No amount of arguing, web links or physical evidence will change his mind... I've tried.

DNG files are larger than my RAW files. That's argument enough for me not to use DNG.

Question for those who know. Are there any non-Adobe software currently using DNG ?

Kolia · Aug 13, 2013

Oh and a good photographer shouldn't need to edit his pictures anyways !

Perfect out the sensor all the time !

Lol.

Gavjenks · Aug 13, 2013

store every picture in every format you can possibly save it in starting from your raw file and working your way down to jpeg.

That's a legitimate solution, I guess. Sounds annoying to take the time to do, but if you could set up a batch process it would be a reasonable and clever solution.

Dao said:
Floppy were one time as a standard, most people use that as a tool to store stuff in the past. Backup important data on it as well.

Yes, and BECAUSE it was such a widely used standard, floppy disks are not only still in use right now, but they also still manufacture floppy drives that you can plug into your modern computer via USB for less than $25. Here's four of them for sale right here:
Floppy Drives, Floppy Disk Drives, External Floppy Drive - Newegg.com

And here's a 10 pack of brand new floppy disks for sale:
Amazon.com: Sony 10MFD2HDLF 2HD 3.5-Inch IBM Formatted Floppy Disks (10-Pack): Electronics

This is a perfect perfect example of what I said right at the very start: Files in standard, worldwide formats will inevitably give you years and years and years of time to switch over at your convenience, with dozens or hundreds of different commercially available tools and options for doing so and absolutely no threat of not being able to find a conversion solution, and no threat of it requiring any significant hassle. If you still had a stack of old 3.5 floppies in your cupboard, assuming they hadn't disintegrated, you could go buy a drive manufactured a month ago, have it delivered in 2 days, and put them on your Windows 7 hard drive with plug and play drivers, no problem.

The best format for me to store my photos now is RAW because it contains all the information

DNG not only stores every scrap of the same information, but it also has the ability to store even more than RAW does. In addition to being designed to be easily compatible, unlike RAW. This is also true of TIFF and other formats. "Containing all of the information" is not impressive or unique when it comes to images. There's some words, and some pixels... not a big deal.

I strongly believe I have time to convert them if needed.

I'm not talking about losing all your photos forever. I'm talking about HASSLE. Yeah you could probably find a way, but the hassle for RAW conversion later is pretty much guaranteed to rise significantly higher and higher than jpeg, tiff, dng, etc. the longer you store them.

Canon, for instance, clearly doesn't give a crap about any of your files being viewable or usable on anything other than their own Digital Photo Pro software that comes with your camera. They routinely release cameras without having helped out or collaborated with Adobe or others in making their RAW files even readable at all (lightroom, photoshop, OR dng converters), and the very notion of having a non-standardized RAW format in the first place only really makes sense at all if you want to RESTRICT the usability of your formats to encourage people to use your own software.

Canon, in other words, has a vested interest in you being unable to easily open up RAW files with easily available software. There's not really any other obvious explanation for why they wouldn't just use DNG or PNG or TIFF or something as their in-camera raw format in the first place.

This is why I continue to post in this thread, despite it being fairly head-wall-banging. Because it's just so utterly rididiculous to actively advocate the usage of a format for storage that was basically specially engineered to NOT be compatible with stuff.

If I were given the task of sitting down and coming up with the worst possible format for long term storage of file information, I would pretty much draw up something similar to camera RAW formats.

Gavjenks · Aug 13, 2013

DNG files are larger than my RAW files. That's argument enough for me not to use DNG.

That's because they have larger headers to allow them to store more types of metadata than RAW does.

So now all of the sudden, the (nonfactual) argument that RAW is better because it stores more information has been given up on, and the new strategy is to say it's better because it stores less information?

Lulz.

Anyway, as Pixmedic pointed out, a megabyte or two more file space costs like 1/100th of a penny to store. Which is an order of magnitude lower than even the cost of wearing down your shutter by activating it once. 10-15% Space differences are not much of a reason to choose a format. 10,000% space differences MIGHT matter (in the case of storing permanently-edited compressed jpegs)

Kolia · Aug 13, 2013

Assuming a camera manufacturer X has evil intent because it doesn't want to restrict itself with Adobe's format is ridiculous.

Come on.

Kolia · Aug 13, 2013

Gavjenks said:
DNG files are larger than my RAW files. That's argument enough for me not to use DNG.

Click to expand...

That's because they have larger headers to allow them to store more types of metadata than RAW does.

So now all of the sudden, the (nonfactual) argument that RAW is better because it stores more information has been given up on, and the new strategy is to say it's better because it stores less information?

Lulz.

Anyway, as Pixmedic pointed out, a megabyte or two more file space costs like 1/100th of a penny to store. Which is an order of magnitude lower than even the cost of wearing down your shutter by activating it once. 10-15% Space differences are not much of a reason to choose a format. 10,000% space differences MIGHT matter (in the case of storing permanently-edited compressed jpegs)

You see what meant guys ?

Even the single possible argument that points away from his idea is rejected.

Anybody else would concede that ok, 10-15% (closer to 20% with my Sony RAW files) is a significant saving.

Not Gav tho. Never surrender ! Lol

table1349 · Aug 13, 2013

I do believe that this now describes this thread perfectly....

http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Ol...ock&href=TWE/2013/08/04&id=Ar0800200&ext=.png

Gavjenks · Aug 13, 2013

Kolia said:
Assuming a camera manufacturer X has evil intent because it doesn't want to restrict itself with Adobe's format is ridiculous.

Come on.

It has nothing to do with Adobe. You could also just choose TIFF or PNG (which does support arbitrary amounts of metadata as well) or other non-company-specific formats.

And I'm not assuming, nor did I say it was evil. It's a simple fact that most of their models ship out without the ability to open their RAW files with any software at all (Adobe or otherwise) except Canon's own DPP. That's not "evil," but it is very much an obvious attempt to make it difficult to use other people's software, since there's not really any other good reason to use a proprietary file format.

Anybody else would concede that ok, 10-15% (closer to 20% with my Sony RAW files) is a significant saving.

The point is that there's a reason why it is 10-15% higher. And the reason is exactly what people earlier in the thread were saying was a GOOD thing: more metadata ability.

Now, all of the sudden, it's a bad thing. Can't have it both ways.

If you simply removed the extra metadata ability from DNG (which you could do by just using a standard basic lossless JPEG format, instead), then it would be pretty much exactly the same size as a RAW, but with more compatibility. That option exists already. It's just slightly less convenient than DNG because there's not a readily available free batch processing program available to use to make it super easy. And your adobe products wouldn't automatically recognize it when opened as a file that you might want to convert to 8 bit, like with DNG (doesn't stop you from doing that anyway, though). Still more convenient than a RAW, though... And also, if Canon did that, then places like Adobe WOULD give you the option of automatically recognizing it as a raw type file that you might want to convert.

In fact, many of your camera RAW formats also probably use lossless JPEG for their compression already, but then simply add some random bit of information to make it not compatible anymore on purpose.