When working and saving files with photoshop, are there any advantages in saving as psd as opposed to tiff, or visa versa.
Or is it just a personal preference thing.
Thanks for you time.
TIF only. It can hold all the same objects as PSD (layers, smart objects, type etc.) and TIF is more safe on the long term because it's an open, industry standard.
PSD is proprietary (Adobe/Photoshop etc. only) and is already antiquated since programming changes that happened during the Creative Suite updates. According to the Adobe engineers PSD is no longer expected to be viable long-term.
In addition, to use PSDs in Lightroom you have to save them with the Maximize Compatibility option enabled, which embeds a flattened version of the layers within the file.
I used PSD for my working files exclusively for many years; I've since gone back and resaved nearly all of them as TIF. (Easy to do with actions.)
I won't be using PSD ever again.
If you need more specific information, Jeff Schewe has participated in some good threads about this on Luminous Landscape's forum.
Wow! Well, Nathaniel makes a great case! Glad I have been saving in tiffs all along, plus a jpg (saved at 8 quality which is probably too high) for easy uploading to my website. So, I have been saving in both tiff, jpg, and also saving the original in-camera jpg. It eats up more disk space, but feel it has me covered for all sorts of things. Plus, I use the Tiffs for prints. I take too many photographs for using RAW. I would wind up using more time in post processing than taking the photos. People seeing my prints or web work would have no idea how I saved them or how I processed them. I shoot Nikon D200 and now D700 and find the in-camera jpg's to work out fine.
While I don't always agree with Ken Rockwell (see his website for tons of incredible data), I pretty much agree with him on the RAW issue. However, after all is said and done, there are many things that would be better done in RAW - just not for my style of shooting or quantity, or changeups in light, contrast and other things that rule out using actions on multiple images, etc. I still post process my straight from camera jpg's and save as tiff's first and only then save a jpg copy of my own making. The post processing is much less than what I would have to do if using RAW. Many people will argue this issue and will have very good arguments!
Funny, if TIFFs hold everything a PSD holds, why on earth am I saving as PSD? OK, TIFFs are bigger, but a 1 terabyte drive is $99... almost hard to wrap my head around that much storage... I paid $200 for 1MB of RAM for my Mac Portable in 1990!
TIFF is the way to go for me I realize. Good thread! Nat, you convinced me.
Never heard this slam by Adobe as to psd being antiquated. Interesting. I have always used psd since they take up less space and are native to the software. I believe there are advantages to staying with the native file type unless compelling reasons otherwise. Granted storage is cheaper than ever but I'm already up to 24 external hard drives. I'm sure others have many more but the point is, space is still a factor. A terabyte goes faster than you think! I will certainly remain open however and read all the threads and suggestions given here. Guess I probably should've done that first but I wanted to at least bear witness for psd, at least for now. Certainly if tif is truly a better way to go, I'll be changing all mine as well!
PS: I shoot nothing but Canon and Canon jpgs are great too but no matter what brand makes the jpg, some data is discarded in-camera during the conversion that you can never get back! The RAW step is worth it for me to have as much data as possible for large prints (24x36) as well as extreme crops when needed. It's all personal preference though. Jpg's work great for a large number of folks and we should all do what works for us. I believe photography should be enjoyable and not frustrating. When it's not fun anymore, sell your gear and take up something else. So jpg folks, keep on keepin on and have a good time!
I was debating this issue myself until a few weeks ago when I saw a television show about the Library of Congress. They are digitizing all of their valuable art books as they know one day the books themselves will deteriorate beyond repair. Before they embarked on such an expensive project they surely must have done a thorough amount of research to determine the best format to save the files. They are using TIF.
Posted by Brent Murphy on May 29, 2009 at 10:39 AM
Hmm.... I guess I might have to disagree about PSD files being smaller than TIFs. I believe it all depends on 1) whether you save your PSDs with "Maximize Compatibility" turned on, and 2) if you save your TIFs with compression. I generally save my TIF files with LZW compression and have found that these files are smaller than a PSD file from the same image.
Personally, I love Photoshop, and plan to continue to use it as long as it's around, but I would always prefer to have an open file type like TIF, instead of a proprietary format like PSD.
Maximize Compatibility increases PSD file size to around the same size as a TIF, because with layers both files will also contain a flattened, full-size preview.
With TIF you do have the option of lossless compression; LZW is OK but takes a bit longer to open (decompress) large files. I don't usually bother with compression on TIFs.
And since the issue of raw files has been brought up too, I should mention that these days the only files that I work in Photoshop (and then save as TIF) are composites or images needing heavy processing (noise reduction, complex retouching etc.) And maybe some flat print files.
Probably 95% (?) now done entirely in Lightroom, using DNG files. Way easier than working with large TIFs. I'm a huge fan of metadata editing whenever possible...
With the 5D2 my raw [DNG] files are around 21 MB; flat 16-bit TIFs from these files are around 65 MB... and adding layers it's easy to get into several hundred megs per image. So the decision to do as much as possible without going to TIF is as much about economy as it is efficiency... as a result my 500 GB working drives will soon need to be replaced with TB's.
Discussion
8 repliesOr is it just a personal preference thing.
Thanks for you time.
Thread 1
Thread 2
Thread 3
Plus this one which might be valuable...
Thread 4
PSD is proprietary (Adobe/Photoshop etc. only) and is already antiquated since programming changes that happened during the Creative Suite updates. According to the Adobe engineers PSD is no longer expected to be viable long-term.
In addition, to use PSDs in Lightroom you have to save them with the Maximize Compatibility option enabled, which embeds a flattened version of the layers within the file.
I used PSD for my working files exclusively for many years; I've since gone back and resaved nearly all of them as TIF. (Easy to do with actions.)
I won't be using PSD ever again.
If you need more specific information, Jeff Schewe has participated in some good threads about this on Luminous Landscape's forum.
While I don't always agree with Ken Rockwell (see his website for tons of incredible data), I pretty much agree with him on the RAW issue. However, after all is said and done, there are many things that would be better done in RAW - just not for my style of shooting or quantity, or changeups in light, contrast and other things that rule out using actions on multiple images, etc. I still post process my straight from camera jpg's and save as tiff's first and only then save a jpg copy of my own making. The post processing is much less than what I would have to do if using RAW. Many people will argue this issue and will have very good arguments!
Troup
TIFF is the way to go for me I realize. Good thread! Nat, you convinced me.
PS: I shoot nothing but Canon and Canon jpgs are great too but no matter what brand makes the jpg, some data is discarded in-camera during the conversion that you can never get back! The RAW step is worth it for me to have as much data as possible for large prints (24x36) as well as extreme crops when needed. It's all personal preference though. Jpg's work great for a large number of folks and we should all do what works for us. I believe photography should be enjoyable and not frustrating. When it's not fun anymore, sell your gear and take up something else. So jpg folks, keep on keepin on and have a good time!
Personally, I love Photoshop, and plan to continue to use it as long as it's around, but I would always prefer to have an open file type like TIF, instead of a proprietary format like PSD.
With TIF you do have the option of lossless compression; LZW is OK but takes a bit longer to open (decompress) large files. I don't usually bother with compression on TIFs.
And since the issue of raw files has been brought up too, I should mention that these days the only files that I work in Photoshop (and then save as TIF) are composites or images needing heavy processing (noise reduction, complex retouching etc.) And maybe some flat print files.
Probably 95% (?) now done entirely in Lightroom, using DNG files. Way easier than working with large TIFs. I'm a huge fan of metadata editing whenever possible...
With the 5D2 my raw [DNG] files are around 21 MB; flat 16-bit TIFs from these files are around 65 MB... and adding layers it's easy to get into several hundred megs per image. So the decision to do as much as possible without going to TIF is as much about economy as it is efficiency... as a result my 500 GB working drives will soon need to be replaced with TB's.