TIFF or PNG

~D~ · 10 Sep 2009 at 15:03

PNG and TIFF formats both offer lossless compression when saving, thus preserving all the data in a picture and PNG file are a LOT smaller than TIFF files.

So my question is why is TIFF still the preferred method of saving photographs in a lossless format?

Amp34 · 10 Sep 2009 at 15:16

I save mine as Tiff with LZW compression, apparently pretty much lossless and only takes up about 10mb instead of 30.

asim18 · 10 Sep 2009 at 17:29

TIFF lets me keep exif data.

I've tried saving as PNG with Photosohop and it strips all exif data.

Amp34 said:
I save mine as Tiff with LZW compression, apparently pretty much lossless and only takes up about 10mb instead of 30.

I've always used ZIP compression. I'm gonna test out LZW and compare the two.

lord filbuster · 10 Sep 2009 at 18:18

Zip takes much longer to save, is only slightly smaller, and can't be read by windows picture viewer. I would stick to lzw. i used the gimp, maybe you will get different results in photoshop.

~D~ · 10 Sep 2009 at 18:49

asim18 said:
TIFF lets me keep exif data.

I've tried saving as PNG with Photosohop and it strips all exif data..

Ah hah, that solves my conundrum, TIFF it is.

Irish_Tom · 10 Sep 2009 at 19:32

I gave up on Tiffs long ago and I'd only use PNGs for web-graphics.

My work-flow consists of RAW and Jpeg with a Photoshop file in between should the need arise.

Panzer

knowlesy · 10 Sep 2009 at 23:07

lightroom dosent read png and photomatix can output in tiffs so raw > dng on import and jpegs for posting and tiff > dng when creating hdr and importing and png for photoshopping