Your photo sharing community!

Share On

hello, I just got Canon 20D and I'll be shooting portraits and headshots, since I'm new to digital, I don't know whether the clients should get their pictures on the CD in TIFF 8 or TIFF 16. I personally can't tell the difference. Am I wrong amd is there any difference between these two? RAW files look so perfect and then when I look at other formats which are TIFF and JPEG they are so bad looking. is there any way to put RAW files straight to CD? Please help.
thanks for any suggestions.
diana

If I am not mistaken TIF 8 only has an 8 bit pixel depth meaning 256 shades of grey where a TIF16 has a 16 bit depth giving you approx. 65,000 shades of grey. Depending on your quality of output device it would be pretty hard to tell the difference, the human eye is not that sensative to fine changes like that.

If you are shooting for keeps, you should always shoot in RAW mode anyway if you have it. This will give you the full sensor output that you can adjust as needed after the fact to obtain perfect images.

Phil

An 8-bit RGB image has 8 bits dedicated to each color channel. That is, each color ranges in value from 0 to 255. For a grayscale image, where all three channels contribute equally, this results in 256 steps or tonal values. For a color image this implies 256x256x256 or 16,777,216 possible colors.

A 16-bit image has 16 bits dedicated to each color channel. Each color ranges in value from 0 to 65535.

Those are the fact. Beyond this, there is a lot of debate over whether you will see any real improvement over using 16 bit images. I always do, because when you're shooting for print publication, you want to really try and acheive the best quality possible.

However, there are alot more factors that go into making a normal sized properly exposed print, whether dye-sub, ink jet, offset press or on-demand digital, that will imapct the quality of the print much more than the bit depth. You have to convert to 8 bit for printers and RIPs anyhow, however, in the near future some RIPs and printers will probably take advantage of the greater data contained in the 16 bit TIFFs.

If hardrive storage is an issue, than I would still shoot RAW, and try to keep your TIFFs at 8 bit with all necessary modifications done, and the 16 bit RAW files (preferebly on another physical drive) as digital negatives for burning to CD and removing the files from your hardrives.

Where it seems you will be doing pro work, you should try to shoot in 16 bit and metaciously maintain a working archive of original unedited RAW files.

sorry....I forget to answer your main question...supply your customers with

8-bit RGB TIFFs

The average person won't understand why nothing works in photoshop on their portrait, and also QuarkXpress and other standard page layout apps (like ones that newspapers use where your clients will probably be sending these files) don't yet support 16 bit images.

If you really wanted to, you could correct for CMYK printing as well and supply them with TIFFs in that color mode, but I leave mine Adobe RGB '98 unless I know the specific color setting for conversion to CMYK for the press/paper it is being printed on (ie: US Web Coated SWOP, newsprint, etc.) Also, they may use the photos in a wide range of presses and paper stocks, so it's better to let each prepress operator convert the images to cover their specific needs.

My advice is to NEVER archive to cd or dvd as your only backup source. Those discs are too flaky and deteriorate quickly.

You should have a dedicated external hard drive for archiving and not daily use.

thanks all of you for the help. I'll consider everything you say.
diana

Then again if you want a really reliable archive that will still be around and usable in 25 years or more, output your digital image to film and make a negative or transparency of it. ;=)

Phil

Gene Z.	Gerhard B.	Jan S.	Jan S.	Jill B.	Gregory M.	Dave K.	a. S.

	Sign Up Now! \| Log In \| Help
	Your photo sharing community!