Best Tiff To Pdf Converter
Badomero Schoulund
Although the question relates to a Canon 10D camera, the RAW converter and printer were not specified. I'm quite confident that even YOU might see a difference between TIF and JPG conversions when printed, especially considering the variety of JPG choices, let alone RAW conversion choices, let alone printer choices.
Photography is an art as well as a science, Michael. Why not test, experiment and tell us what YOU found taking the same RAW picture and trying a variety of both ways. Then you can tell us what you found in the final prints.
However, if the print is for a non-photography-oriented client, they may only care about the recognizeability of the content, and not know or care about the potentially lost subtleties of shadow and highlight details and smooth tonal and chromal transitions.
16-bit per color channel lossless information, or 8-bit per color channel lossy information. JPG = less than 1/4 of the information of a TIF -- and surprisingly we're quite pleased with JPG. Who'd o' thunk it? =8^o
make a 16x20 printed from a first generation jpeg (just something to send to the print shop not to modify) and another printed from a 16bit tiff (also a file to send to the print shop and not to modify).
then tell if you can see the difference. or if you think the tiff will be worth the extra time. since the question is not what is good to work with but what is good to print. we assume that the process upto the print point is fine and dandy.
yes to your first statement, and on the second.. if you want. I wouldn't but that is mostly personal preferrence. I think keeping the RAW files are nice becuase 1: if a better coverter comes out you can reprocess some of your favorites. 2: if you ever decide to start from scratch or if you learn more in PS but have edited your processed file beyond repair (or didn't use layers), then you can start from scratch again.
2. Lots of photographers will use Photoshop and the most useful intermediate or working format would be the Photoshop file type PSD. This will preserve all the layers, channels, masks and anything else you might have done in post processing. If you don't use photoshop, your image editor may have some other native file type that you should use to save your work. Don't forget to save BOTH the RAW file and the working file (PSD etc). Working files can become behemoths (150mb, 200mb or whatever) very quickly for some post processors.
3. Printers generally use 8-bit files. Even if your lab will accept 16-bit files the printer software will convert to whatever the printer wants before it does anything with the file. So many folks prefer to create a file as close to what the printer is going to want as possible, leaving as little as possible to lab technicians and/or unknown software programs.
4. Keep the story of the "Princess and the Pea" in mind whenever folks denigrate JPEG file formats. It was, after all, created by a group of photographic experts. It may be literally true that software can detect the JPEG compression artifacts, but that does not mean the human eye can be as discriminating.
Let say, i convert RAW to TIFF. Use photoshop to edit TIFF file. After i'm done , i save it to Jpeg and send it to the lab. This way, do Jpeg is still the first general with all stuffs lossless i want.
More often than not, the modifications I make during RAW conversion and post-processing are quite moderate, and as a space saver, I prefer keeping the RAW file with a note detailing the conversion parameters and post-processing paramaters, which then can be replicated with ease later if needed. This saves a lot of space, since I like to resize for optimum output size before working on the image in PS, and the ensuing TIFF file would be huge compared to the RAW.
I'm not sure if anyone else does it this way, but at least it works for me at present. For work that requires any retouching, complex merging of photos, etc, it is of course not feasible to replicate this later, and in those few cases, the TIFF file will be the original to go to, but I'd still keep the RAW files. Compared to today's storage media capacities, they are really tiny.
I have considered before (instead I just bought bigger hard drives) recording an action for any image as I am editing... then saving the action to the same folder as the raw file, and dumping the PSD file.
Granted, there is probably some size limitation that one might run into... I don't know. But it may be worth looking into, if you don't want to save those 100+MB PSD/TIF files, but would rather stick with your 6-20MB raw file plus a few KB worth of action file.
The idea is you keep your DNG file. It's the digital negative (the input). But when you post-process it you save your changes in another file format (the output). If you want TIFF as your output format then no problem.
I'm a bit puzzled by this question. What file browser do you use that it does not support DNG? The idea behind DNG is an universal platform that can incorporate other formats like Tiff and Jpeg. In that sense you are retrogressing. If all goes the way it appears to be going, DNG will be more future-proof than Tiff. And you can always convert your individual DNG file to tiff for post-processing, keeping the original data safe in the DNG format.
Scott, if you are looking for an ADDITIONAL file to make viewing easy, and not planning on throwing the DNG away, that makes a lot of sense. In additional to being your original negative, The DNG is the only format that allows you to use linear editing on the image (in a raw processor). When you edit in Photoshop, editing can be destructive of the image (stuff changes).
In order to have an easy viewing facility, I shoot jpg + hi-res when I take the picture. This gives me the somewhat smaller jpg that I can use with any viewer, without having to use a raw converter. I happen to use ACDSee as my viewer. It came free with my D2 and shows pictures as large images and allows scrolling thru the pix.
If you are want an additional copy of your negative, this also makes sense. However, a DNG is 10MB and the corresponding tiff is about 25MB. Also, you can't edit a tiff in the digital domain (that is, in a linear fashion and without changing the image, possibly harmfully). Depending on the software you are using, you might choose a compressed tiff, using lossless compression. However, such a compressed file may not be viewable by some viewers, so that would defeat the first purpose.
(1) I get a backup of the image at capture time. In 16 months of picture taking with the M8, I have lost 1 of the pair on four occasions. I can't determine where the fult lies because it might be the SD card or the camera. I am just happy to have an alternative image.
(2) The jpg is about 1/3 the size of the dng and is easily handled by photo viewers. I also have an Apple G4 laptop and have used iphoto to view these images at some shoots. There is no raw processor on that computer.
If you are looking for backup solutions, you might search the Forum for that topic. There have been at least 2 very informative threads on the subject, with lots of discussion about mirroring, RAID, external arrays, and the like.
Bill, I've always been a bit confused about the destructive vs non-destructive editing. Exporting from Bridge to ACR does nothing, Raw conversion is natturlly destructive of that file, and CS3, well, I understand what that does, as far as my understanding goes, that is. But the original RAW remains unchanged on disk, does it not? ACR may add a little file with settings to the DNG, but that is all as I understand. Enlighten me please.
This is helpful, but for for over a year I've set my menu to only record dng and viewing has required I flip through all my pictures using Phase One, which is fine but no longer viable as my wife wants to thumb nail and put some of my pictures in a powerpoint presentation. I've gotten the message loud and clear over the past hour that I would be a fool too discard my dng files, but I hate jpegs because of the poor quality and frankly wasted space. TIFF's are a memory hog, but at least of quality so I thought to convert over to TIFF and save expensive memory--dumb idea is the consensus. Guess I need to create a crop of junk JPEGs for myself and waste the memory for perusal purposes.
ACR will write the changes you make to a Leica M8 DNG file TO THE ORIGINAL DNG as a ADD-ON. Doing nothing to the original, IE those changes/edits can be removed or modified any number of times without actually changing the original RAW/DNG file.
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