Posted by Cynthia Spence on December 29, 2010 at 11:07 PM
My final file for a project needs to be jpg. However, I'm not resizing any of the photos. I'm starting in LR then exporting as jpeg to photoshop elements for more adjustments then saving as jpeg. Is it still losing quality from RAW after the export then another save as jpg, even though there is no resizing? Is it better to export as tiff from LR then save as jpeg in photoshop? Or does it matter?
Any time you resave a jpg, even if no resizing is done, there is a loss of data. Whether or not this will be visible depends greatly upon the image. Therefore, I think it best to first save your converted RAW file as a TIFF. Next, make all your adjustments to the TIFF image. When all is good, duplicate the TIFF image, resize and sharpen as needed. Be sure to to convert the color profile to the one you want, e.g. sRGB. Once this is done, save as a jpeg with the color profile embedded.
--P
Posted by John Reed on December 30, 2010 at 7:30 AM
Given that you say you make some final adjustments in Elements, if you have a later version of Elements you might consider simply doing all your work there and leave Lightroom out of the loop thereby requiring only one "save".
When it comes to adjusting the image, there is really nothing you can do in Lightroom that you can't do in Photoshop but the opposite is not true. If you have a newer version of Elements, the same is so. Don't get me wrong. Lightroom is great and does offer other things to make it extremely useful. I'm only talking about photo editing such as one does in the develop module.
All that said (and probably too much anyway), just stay with tif as suggested and eliminate the problem.
We do as Preston describes for the simple reason that over time we can need different sizes of jpegs from the original file. If the work is done entirely in TIFF and that file is saved, then any subsequent preparations of jpegs involve only the single save as a jpeg. If we did the adjustments on the large jpeg and saved that, then we'd either have to back to the original and do all the work again in order to produce the next generation of jpeg, or resave the first jpeg in the new size. Going back through our files I notice that some original images have resulted in as many as 7 different jpegs.
Discussion
3 repliesAny time you resave a jpg, even if no resizing is done, there is a loss of data. Whether or not this will be visible depends greatly upon the image. Therefore, I think it best to first save your converted RAW file as a TIFF. Next, make all your adjustments to the TIFF image. When all is good, duplicate the TIFF image, resize and sharpen as needed. Be sure to to convert the color profile to the one you want, e.g. sRGB. Once this is done, save as a jpeg with the color profile embedded.
--P
When it comes to adjusting the image, there is really nothing you can do in Lightroom that you can't do in Photoshop but the opposite is not true. If you have a newer version of Elements, the same is so. Don't get me wrong. Lightroom is great and does offer other things to make it extremely useful. I'm only talking about photo editing such as one does in the develop module.
All that said (and probably too much anyway), just stay with tif as suggested and eliminate the problem.
JR