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As a hobby photographer, this is a deeply interesting topic. I keep all my scans (yes, film still exists) as TIF files, but my clients don't know what to do wit
by ryukoposting 4y ago
As a hobby photographer, this is a deeply interesting topic. I keep all my scans (yes, film still exists) as TIF files, but my clients don't know what to do with a TIF (and even fewer know how to tell a printer that the image uses a particular colorspace) so I usually send them the TIFs, plus some high-quality JPEGs. Why not HEIC/AVIF/etc? Because people know what a JPEG is.
- shmerl 4y agoWhy TIF vs for example PNG? Are there any benefits?
- ace2358 4y agoI’m under the impression that TIFF is lossless (like FLAC) while png is lossy (like ogg).
- bscphil 4y agoPNG is not lossy. However, it doesn't support metadata anywhere nearly as well as TIFF, so I still use that for lossless photography storage.
- ace2358 4y agoAh there you go! Didn’t know that :)
- vetinari 4y agoTIFF is a container. The payload it contains can be uncompressed, compressed losslessly with lzw//deflate/lzma/zstd, but it can also be lossy compressed with JPEG, WebP or even JPEG XL. Meanwhile, PNG is always compressed, lossless.
- LinAGKar 4y agoOgg is a container, you can have lossless FLAC in ogg.
- ace2358 4y agoI also didn’t know that! Thanks for letting me know
- ygra 4y agoAt least some camera raw files are also TIFF under the hood, e.g. Canon's CR2. TIFF also natively supports more than 8 bits per color channel, so you can still edit the photo and don't necessarily lose information in the process, whereas a single exposure adjustment on a PNG could lead to clipping and irrecoverable highlights or shadows.
- bscphil 4y agoDo you have any more information about this? I thought CR2 was floating point. Any details about how they store the mosaiced data in a TIFF would be very interesting, I assume.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoEXIF is a TIFF file. I think most modern JPEG files are EXIF packages. A quick way to check, is to look at the first two bytes of a file. They are sort of a “BOM marker,” and will be either “II” or “MM”. TIFF is really a package format. It’s so flexible, that it’s damn near impossible to write a “full-fat” TIFF reader (I’ve done that. Never again). TIFF is so flexible, that you can define an image to have a 6-bit R channel, and a 12-bit G channel, for instance. I think some medical or scientific images may have actually done that. You can also have pretty much any type of compression that you want, for the image data. But most people use TIFF to store uncompressed “raw” image data. These files can be crazy big, but also won’t have compression artifacts.
- out_of_protocol 4y agoLossless jpeg xl could be a good choice for perfect archive copy, if needed. no idea about metadata though