What’s the difference between a TIFF and JPEG? What’s the better format to print in? What about PSD? – Can that be printed?

I use PIX Resizer for doing batches and single file resizing, think it has convert also so can output to different file types.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF

Tagged Image File Format (also known as TIFF) is a container format for storing images, including photographs and line art. It is now under the control of Adobe. Originally created by the company Aldus for use with what was then called “desktop publishing,” TIFF is a popular format for color and black and white images. The TIFF format is widely supported by image-manipulation applications, by publishing and page layout applications, by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition and other applications. Adobe Systems, which acquired Aldus, now holds the copyright to the TIFF specification. TIFF has not had a major update since 1992, though several Aldus/Adobe technical notes have been published with minor extensions to the format, and several specifications, including TIFF/EP, have been based on the TIFF 6.0 specification.

To a great extent it depends on how much resolution you want or need.
TIFFs are much bigger files with better resolution e.g. I have a TIFF file of 25.5 MB. The same file saved as a JPEG is 2.28MB.

Tiff is a lossless format where jpeg is lossy.

Which may not mean much to the average user, but if you are using the file a lot the jpeg will gradually lose some of its fidelity, whereas the tiff will stay the same regardless of how many times the file is opened.

TIFF can be lossy or lossless. A lossless compressed TIFF can end up being a bigger file size than the uncompressed version because the compression algorithm is stored as part of the TIFF file. TIFF is just a standard used by printers and is not really worth using on a personal basis. TIFF also supports layered images.

JPG is a lossy compressed format. The image quality will depend on the amount of compression applied. The more compression the smaller the file size, but more of the image information is discarded to achieve this. JPG is a good choice for storing photographs.

PNG is a lossless compressed format that produces much smaller file sizes than TIFF.

jjjust moi said:

Tiff is a lossless format where jpeg is lossy.

Which may not mean much to the average user, but if you are using the file a lot the jpeg will gradually lose some of its fidelity, whereas the tiff will stay the same regardless of how many times the file is opened.

JPG quality will only be compromised each time the file is saved, not each time it is opened.

PIXresizer outputs BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF by the looks.

Fairly old version mine perhaps, but always served me well. Quick too, always was impressed.

Probably better things, but you know I am old.

If you are working on an image in Photoshop, it will probably be PSD.

As people have said, TIF / TIFF are high quality and lossless but are large files and not supported by all apps.

For general use, JPG / JPEG are the best compromise between quality, file size and commonality. The apps that use images but do not support JPEG are very few & far between.

jjjust moi said:

Tiff is a lossless format where jpeg is lossy.

Which may not mean much to the average user, but if you are using the file a lot the jpeg will gradually lose some of its fidelity, whereas the tiff will stay the same regardless of how many times the file is opened.

Is that right? I though you would only lose fidelity if you open then re-save. If I keep a jpeg on my hard drive and open it several times, surely the file on the hard drive is not changed ?

pommiejohn said:

jjjust moi said:

Tiff is a lossless format where jpeg is lossy.

Which may not mean much to the average user, but if you are using the file a lot the jpeg will gradually lose some of its fidelity, whereas the tiff will stay the same regardless of how many times the file is opened.

Is that right? I though you would only lose fidelity if you open then re-save. If I keep a jpeg on my hard drive and open it several times, surely the file on the hard drive is not changed ?

You are correct. Just viewing a file can’t change it.

pommiejohn said:

jjjust moi said:

Tiff is a lossless format where jpeg is lossy.

Which may not mean much to the average user, but if you are using the file a lot the jpeg will gradually lose some of its fidelity, whereas the tiff will stay the same regardless of how many times the file is opened.

Is that right? I though you would only lose fidelity if you open then re-save. If I keep a jpeg on my hard drive and open it several times, surely the file on the hard drive is not changed ?

I use TIFF for archiving & “save as” JPEG for printing & emailing because a TIFF file is at least 10 times larger than the same file in JPEG

Tamb said:

I use TIFF for archiving & “save as” JPEG for printing & emailing because a TIFF file is at least 10 times larger than the same file in JPEG

Pretty much what I do except I usually supply tiffs for print, and I keep jpegs on my hard drive so I can e mail them without having to re size them. That’s why I was wondering whether they degraded each time you opened them.

pommiejohn said:

Tamb said:

I use TIFF for archiving & “save as” JPEG for printing & emailing because a TIFF file is at least 10 times larger than the same file in JPEG

Pretty much what I do except I usually supply tiffs for print, and I keep jpegs on my hard drive so I can e mail them without having to re size them. That’s why I was wondering whether they degraded each time you opened them.

I keep my TIFFs on a dedicated XP computer and the public access JPEGs on a Mac.
Printing on a normal colour printer is done in JPEG & photo quality is done in TIFF.
JPEG is a compression system so there is some loss. I’m not sure if it occurs when the file is opened & closed but as that involves decompressing & recompressing it might happen.

fsm said:

TIFF can be lossy or lossless. A lossless compressed TIFF can end up being a bigger file size than the uncompressed version because the compression algorithm is stored as part of the TIFF file. TIFF is just a standard used by printers and is not really worth using on a personal basis. TIFF also supports layered images.

JPG is a lossy compressed format. The image quality will depend on the amount of compression applied. The more compression the smaller the file size, but more of the image information is discarded to achieve this. JPG is a good choice for storing photographs.

PNG is a lossless compressed format that produces much smaller file sizes than TIFF.

jjjust moi said:

Tiff is a lossless format where jpeg is lossy.

Which may not mean much to the average user, but if you are using the file a lot the jpeg will gradually lose some of its fidelity, whereas the tiff will stay the same regardless of how many times the file is opened.

JPG quality will only be compromised each time the file is saved, not each time it is opened.

That may be correct, but it’s not what I have been taught.

jjjust moi said:

That may be correct, but it’s not what I have been taught.

Sorry to say you were either taught wrong, or you misunderstood.

Back to the OP – there are many ways to store files. Some have small file sizes at the expense of image quality. Some have great image quality at the expense of file size. Somebody comes along and thinks they can do a better job and you have yet another image format to choose from.

BTW, the new kid on the block is “.png’ and is probably the best out there. The best thing about it is that unlike JPG and GIF, the algorithms are in the public domain, and so are guaranteed to be free to use.

My information came from Aldus in the early days of scanners and related software.

There was a specific warning regarding .jpg and loss of fidelity, compared to .tif.

There was no mention of saving, only regular opening and closing.

So do I follow the software maker , or a contributor on an insignificant forum in an insignificant part of the nearly infinite universe?

jjjust moi said:

My information came from Aldus in the early days of scanners and related software.

There was a specific warning regarding .jpg and loss of fidelity, compared to .tif.

There was no mention of saving, only regular opening and closing.

So do I follow the software maker , or a contributor on an insignificant forum in an insignificant part of the nearly infinite universe?

Follow the truth.

Think about it – what if you save images on a CD?
BTW, “opening and closing” in an image editor could easily refer to “opening and saving”.

Carmen_Sandiego said:

jjjust moi said:

My information came from Aldus in the early days of scanners and related software.

There was a specific warning regarding .jpg and loss of fidelity, compared to .tif.

There was no mention of saving, only regular opening and closing.

So do I follow the software maker , or a contributor on an insignificant forum in an insignificant part of the nearly infinite universe?

Follow the truth.

Think about it – what if you save images on a CD?
BTW, “opening and closing” in an image editor could easily refer to “opening and saving”.

Tape drive was the state of the art in those times :)

As others have said, TIFF has its good points, but it has mostly been superceded by more modern image file formats like PNG and SVG.

fsm said:

TIFF is just a standard used by printers and is not really worth using on a personal basis.

To clarify, the word “printers” refers to printing companies, not to the machines that do the actual printing. To print any kind of image, printer driver software has to convert the image file data into primitive commands that the printer hardware understands.

fsm said:

TIFF also supports layered images.

Good point, although image manipulation programs like Photoshop & GIMP that work with layered images have their own image formats that store layer info, as well as other data that’s helpful when you need to save work-in-progress.

TIFF also supports vector graphics , i.e., images that are described geometrically in terms of lines, curves, polygons, etc, rather than as a grid of pixels. Generally, such images can be enlarged without pixelation occuring, and have some advantages when editing, compared to bitmap-based images.

PostScript & PDF can store vector graphics, although the more modern SVG format is probably preferred when working with such images.

fsm said:

JPG is a lossy compressed format. The image quality will depend on the amount of compression applied. The more compression the smaller the file size, but more of the image information is discarded to achieve this. JPG is a good choice for storing photographs.

PNG is a lossless compressed format that produces much smaller file sizes than TIFF.

JPEG was designed to compactly store photographs (and other continuous-tone images). There is a rare lossless variant of JPEG, but most JPEG images utilize lossy compression, but the losses are designed to be not so noticeable by the human visual system, unless very high compression (i.e. low quality) is used. How it does this is a bit technical, but basically, it reduces some of the high frequency randomness in an image. Also, it takes advantage of the fact that humans are more sensitive to variations in brightness than variations in colour, so most JPEG images store the colour information at half the resolution of the brightness information. Eg, a 1024 × 768 JPEG stores the greyscale data at 1024 × 768 but the colour data is only at 512 × 384.

fsm said:

JPG quality will only be compromised each time the file is saved, not each time it is opened.

Indeed!

Actually, it’s possible to perform some lossless operations on JPEGs: cropping and flipping blocks within the image, but only a couple of programs take advantage of this, and those operations have to be aligned with 8×8 pixel blocks.

Carmen_Sandiego said:

BTW, the new kid on the block is ‘.png’ and is probably the best out there. The best thing about it is that unlike JPG and GIF, the algorithms are in the public domain, and so are guaranteed to be free to use.

The PNG file format is public domain, but the PNG software itself is not. However, the standard PNG software library used by most programs that manipulate PNGs is available under a very permissive licence, making it effectively open source, although the PNG licence predates the more well-known GNU GPL free software licence .

A nice feature of PNG that I forgot to mention in my previous post is that it can handle palette-mapped images as well as “true colour” images, and it can also handle various image depths, i.e. the number of bits used to encode colour data. Most true colour PNGs use 8 bits per colour channel (so 24 bits in total) giving 256 levels for each colour , but it’s also possible to create “48 bit” PNGs that use 16 bits per colour channel giving 65536 levels for each colour.

PNGs (and TIFFs) have more sophisticated transparency handling than GIF – these files can contain an “alpha” channel, with stores transparency information for each pixel.

…

FWIW, the software patent on the compression algorithm used in GIF files expired about 10 years ago; see Wikipedia for details.

There are a couple of different compression algorithms that can be used in JPEG files, one of them (arithmetic coding) was covered by a patent , but it was rarely used, and AFAIK that patent has also expired. And since arithmetic-coded JPEGs are extremely rare it’s pretty much a non-issue. :)

Jesus used JPEGs and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you

Dropbear said:

Jesus used JPEGs and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you

Well why did it take him from Friday to Sunday to get back on line.

Dropbear said:

Jesus used JPEGs and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you

:)

JPEG is excellent for the kind of images it was designed for, but it’s crap for things with lots of sharp boundaries. And because of how its lossy compression works, it’s generally a bad idea to use JPEG as an intermediate format while editing an image – either the image manipulator software’s internal format or PNG should be while working on an image, with JPEG used on the final output image.

I often convert my ray-traced images to JPEG before uploading them to Photobucket, etc, but with some images the JPEG looks noticeably inferior to the PNG, except at very high quality settings that produce only a slightly smaller file than the PNG. Sometimes, that can be overcome by a little judicious blurring (since JPEG hates sharp edges and loves continuous changes of tone & colour) but that’s not always desirable.

PM 2Ring said:

Dropbear said:

Jesus used JPEGs and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you

:)

JPEG is excellent for the kind of images it was designed for, but it’s crap for things with lots of sharp boundaries. And because of how its lossy compression works, it’s generally a bad idea to use JPEG as an intermediate format while editing an image – either the image manipulator software’s internal format or PNG should be while working on an image, with JPEG used on the final output image.

I often convert my ray-traced images to JPEG before uploading them to Photobucket, etc, but with some images the JPEG looks noticeably inferior to the PNG, except at very high quality settings that produce only a slightly smaller file than the PNG. Sometimes, that can be overcome by a little judicious blurring (since JPEG hates sharp edges and loves continuous changes of tone & colour) but that’s not always desirable.

Which is all why I shoot in jpg and upload lossy jpg’s so thqt any smartarse will have to at best get ideas and go and take their own photos, rather than simply rip them off.

roughbarked said:

PM 2Ring said:

Dropbear said:

Jesus used JPEGs and if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for you

:)

JPEG is excellent for the kind of images it was designed for, but it’s crap for things with lots of sharp boundaries. And because of how its lossy compression works, it’s generally a bad idea to use JPEG as an intermediate format while editing an image – either the image manipulator software’s internal format or PNG should be while working on an image, with JPEG used on the final output image.

I often convert my ray-traced images to JPEG before uploading them to Photobucket, etc, but with some images the JPEG looks noticeably inferior to the PNG, except at very high quality settings that produce only a slightly smaller file than the PNG. Sometimes, that can be overcome by a little judicious blurring (since JPEG hates sharp edges and loves continuous changes of tone & colour) but that’s not always desirable.

Which is all why I shoot in jpg and upload lossy jpg’s so thqt any smartarse will have to at best get ideas and go and take their own photos, rather than simply rip them off.

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

Tamb said:

roughbarked said:

PM 2Ring said:

:)

JPEG is excellent for the kind of images it was designed for, but it’s crap for things with lots of sharp boundaries. And because of how its lossy compression works, it’s generally a bad idea to use JPEG as an intermediate format while editing an image – either the image manipulator software’s internal format or PNG should be while working on an image, with JPEG used on the final output image.

I often convert my ray-traced images to JPEG before uploading them to Photobucket, etc, but with some images the JPEG looks noticeably inferior to the PNG, except at very high quality settings that produce only a slightly smaller file than the PNG. Sometimes, that can be overcome by a little judicious blurring (since JPEG hates sharp edges and loves continuous changes of tone & colour) but that’s not always desirable.

Which is all why I shoot in jpg and upload lossy jpg’s so thqt any smartarse will have to at best get ideas and go and take their own photos, rather than simply rip them off.

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

I don’t really care.. If I was printing the images they’d all be TIFF.
but as it stands, I’ll be dead before anyone recognises the art inside.

Tamb said:

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

Fair enough, but unless you need the layers or the vector drawing features of TIFF, I recommend archiving in PNG. If some printer insists on TIFF it’s easy enough to convert PNG to TIFF. As mentioned earlier in the thread, PNG compression is generally more compact than TIFF compression. And with PNG you have the benefit of using an actively supported open image format rather than a moribund proprietary format.

PM 2Ring said:

Tamb said:

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

Fair enough, but unless you need the layers or the vector drawing features of TIFF, I recommend archiving in PNG. If some printer insists on TIFF it’s easy enough to convert PNG to TIFF. As mentioned earlier in the thread, PNG compression is generally more compact than TIFF compression. And with PNG you have the benefit of using an actively supported open image format rather than a moribund proprietary format.

I agree thta this is the case.

PM 2Ring said:

Tamb said:

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

Fair enough, but unless you need the layers or the vector drawing features of TIFF, I recommend archiving in PNG. If some printer insists on TIFF it’s easy enough to convert PNG to TIFF. As mentioned earlier in the thread, PNG compression is generally more compact than TIFF compression. And with PNG you have the benefit of using an actively supported open image format rather than a moribund proprietary format.

Thanks mate. I’ll look into it. The downside is that I have over 1000 TIFF images.

Tamb said:

PM 2Ring said:

Tamb said:

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

Fair enough, but unless you need the layers or the vector drawing features of TIFF, I recommend archiving in PNG. If some printer insists on TIFF it’s easy enough to convert PNG to TIFF. As mentioned earlier in the thread, PNG compression is generally more compact than TIFF compression. And with PNG you have the benefit of using an actively supported open image format rather than a moribund proprietary format.

Thanks mate. I’ll look into it. The downside is that I have over 1000 TIFF images.

If it ain’t broken.. don’t fix it.

roughbarked said:

Tamb said:

PM 2Ring said:

Fair enough, but unless you need the layers or the vector drawing features of TIFF, I recommend archiving in PNG. If some printer insists on TIFF it’s easy enough to convert PNG to TIFF. As mentioned earlier in the thread, PNG compression is generally more compact than TIFF compression. And with PNG you have the benefit of using an actively supported open image format rather than a moribund proprietary format.

Thanks mate. I’ll look into it. The downside is that I have over 1000 TIFF images.

If it ain’t broken.. don’t fix it.

Sadly I need to convert my TIFFs to small JPEGs to go onto our public access Mac.
Naturally I save-as in order to retain the original TIFF.

You can use something like Irfanview to batch process them all at once… easy peasy.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Tamb said:

roughbarked said:

Tamb said:

Thanks mate. I’ll look into it. The downside is that I have over 1000 TIFF images.

If it ain’t broken.. don’t fix it.

Sadly I need to convert my TIFFs to small JPEGs to go onto our public access Mac.
Naturally I save-as in order to retain the original TIFF.

I’m on Mac too.

fsm said:

You can use something like Irfanview to batch process them all at once… easy peasy.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Yes. I like Irfanview. I like that facility, too – Great for resizing a group of images for emailing, or transferring from site to head office.

Michael V said:

fsm said:

You can use something like Irfanview to batch process them all at once… easy peasy.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Yes. I like Irfanview. I like that facility, too – Great for resizing a group of images for emailing, or transferring from site to head office.

Image Well for Mac fans too.

Can you use IrfanView on Mac? Yes, probably.

http://www.irfanview.com/faq.htm#Q60

fsm said:

Can you use IrfanView on Mac? Yes, probably.

http://www.irfanview.com/faq.htm#Q60

;)

Tamb said:

PM 2Ring said:

Tamb said:

It’s why I archive in TIFF but publish in JPEG.

Fair enough, but unless you need the layers or the vector drawing features of TIFF, I recommend archiving in PNG. If some printer insists on TIFF it’s easy enough to convert PNG to TIFF. As mentioned earlier in the thread, PNG compression is generally more compact than TIFF compression. And with PNG you have the benefit of using an actively supported open image format rather than a moribund proprietary format.

Thanks mate. I’ll look into it. The downside is that I have over 1000 TIFF images.

Well, just start using PNG for new stuff. :) If you have plenty of space to store the old TIFFs, there’s no rush to convert them, since most decent image manipulation software will continue to offer some level of TIFF support for many years to come.

Converting the old stuff by hand would be tedious, but various programs exist that can do batch conversions. To be honest, batch processing might get a tad complicated if you need to process fancy multi-page TIFFs, but even then, I can’t imagine it being too difficult.

It you’re on a Windows system, Irfanview can do batch conversions. If you need a Mac solution, I suspect that Roughbarked will have some suggestions. I mostly use Linux, and tend to write my own scripts when I need to do batch processing; some of those scripts would probably work on a modern Mac.

If you’re comfortable working with the command line, the multi-platform ImageMagick (or the related GraphicsMagick) can be used to do simple file format conversions as well as all sorts of sophisticated image manipulation.