As a result of the result Arctic winter Games held here, I've been asked to prepared some archival disks of images. They are either in NEF or jpeg format.
The jpegs will remain as they are but I'm wondering as to which format to save the NEF's in, PSD or tiff.
I'm leaning to PSD as it will retain the original best quality and will hopefully be supported by Adobe for some time but would be intewrested in others experience.
PSD is an Adobe proprietary format and such files may not even open in non-Adobe applications. TIFF is a widely used standard graphics format that is lossless, unlike jpeg. For archival purposes, keep your NEF files intact-do not edit them. Use PS to edit them and save the edited files as PSD and TIFF.
Try DNG - Digital Negative - Adobe is trying to bring one unified format for RAW - with their clout it’ll will probably stick! .NEF format has evolved already and .jpeg degrades with constant editing (bear in mind that different mediums require, different editing i.e. for the web, for magazines, for books and so forth – so an image will need to be edited for a particular medium). RAW is the best format! And I think saving all files as .dng is the way to go – but…
always a but, 1000’s of my images are saved as .nef because I haven’t found the time to switch over my old files to .dng and hope .nef as it stands is still recognised by the editing software, in it’s present format in years to come!
They'll only be as "archival" as the software to read them. I used Genuine Fractal's proprietary format for some images years ago, but they're unreadable by any other software now. I'm faced with buying the latest version of GF just to get at those files, and I'm not happy.
In your shoes my question would be whether any off those other formats would be as archival as tiff.
Discussion
4 repliesThe jpegs will remain as they are but I'm wondering as to which format to save the NEF's in, PSD or tiff.
I'm leaning to PSD as it will retain the original best quality and will hopefully be supported by Adobe for some time but would be intewrested in others experience.
Dave
PSD is an Adobe proprietary format and such files may not even open in non-Adobe applications. TIFF is a widely used standard graphics format that is lossless, unlike jpeg. For archival purposes, keep your NEF files intact-do not edit them. Use PS to edit them and save the edited files as PSD and TIFF.
-PB
always a but, 1000’s of my images are saved as .nef because I haven’t found the time to switch over my old files to .dng and hope .nef as it stands is still recognised by the editing software, in it’s present format in years to come!
They'll only be as "archival" as the software to read them. I used Genuine Fractal's proprietary format for some images years ago, but they're unreadable by any other software now. I'm faced with buying the latest version of GF just to get at those files, and I'm not happy.
In your shoes my question would be whether any off those other formats would be as archival as tiff.