Who uses TIFF?

[dryicerx]

For storing their photos? I am working on a application and having issues with cramming tiff support, wanted to see how many folks actually use it.

[zebulus]

I use TIFFS in the processing if I REALLY want to edge out some detail, its kinda like a really lossless Jpg. Why are you cramming a TIFF?

[MHampton]

I wish that LightRoom would support Multi-Page tiffs. It would be nice to scan old photos front and back as a single multi-page tiff file to keep the written info on the back together with the image.

[kenw]

I used it before RAW, but it has largely fallen out of favor since other files types also retain layers, etc in addition to being non-compressed.

I used TIFF for scanned line art (Technical drawings, AutoCad, et al) storage as it scales easily and without any distortion. It works perfectly for that and still does.

Be aware that there are several non-compatible types of TIFF, some of whch are actually compressed.

[dryicerx]

Originally Posted by zebulus

I use TIFFS in the processing if I REALLY want to edge out some detail, its kinda like a really lossless Jpg. Why are you cramming a TIFF?

It's for a application I am developing, currently supports every other file format, but tiff has a weird conflict. i wanted to see how many folks actually still use it.

[venchka]

I do. Folks who scan film do.

[jeffkohn]

Originally Posted by kenw

I used it before RAW, but it has largely fallen out of favor since other files types also retain layers, etc in addition to being non-compressed.

I used TIFF for scanned line art (Technical drawings, AutoCad, et al) storage as it scales easily and without any distortion. It works perfectly for that and still does.

Be aware that there are several non-compatible types of TIFF, some of whch are actually compressed.

The only standard compression options I know of for RAW are LZW and ZIP, both of which are lossless, so it's not like you're losing anything as you would saving to JPEG. And any decent app should let you control the options for how the file is saved. I disable compression when saving a TIFF from Photoshop, because LZW compression will actually make 16-bit files larger, not smaller; and ZIP compression is not support by all applications that support TIFF.

TIFF is a very versatile format that can easily store layers, masks, etc. Photoshop can write pretty much anything to TIFF that it can write to PSD, except I think for smart objects. TIFF is also more widely supported than PSD, and it's a well documented format (unlike PSD which most non-Adobe apps have to reverse engineer).

Having said that I tend to prefer PSD, mainly because saves are a bit faster from Photoshop, and Photoshop also strips away some (but not all) metadata when saving to TIFF. I only save TIFF's for work in applications that don't support PSD (AutoPano Pro and Lightzone come to mind).

[jsbraby]

I use "real" .TIF's for all my scanned negatives and slides. I also use Canon RAW .tif's for everything that comes out of my 1Ds.

[J Eddington]

I use tiffs as my final product

[kenw]

Originally Posted by dryicerx

It's for a application I am developing, currently supports every other file format, but tiff has a weird conflict. i wanted to see how many folks actually still use it.

check to see which sub-type it might support. LZW/FAX/Huffman compressed, -vs- uncompressed, etc. Usually you want ordinary uncompressed, I've run into issues when using the compressed types. If the readers/viewers are really old, they may be an issue however. I used to see an LZW and LZW 77 (? iirc) compression as options that had issues with each other on photographs, but my newest editor only lists LZW.

A few years ago I had a few 1000 drawings that had been scanned with some undetermined but compressed TIFF format and our newly installed database viewer decided it couldn't see them, altho the old one did just fine.....took weeks to straighten out. And unfortunately the viewer itself didn't support TIFF's multi-page option.; that created more grief.

[studiocygnet]

Everything scanned goes to TIF first, that becomes the digital negative. Then they become PSD's after any work is done to them.

[venchka]

Nothing becomes PSD if you don't have Photoshop.

[billbunton]

Originally Posted by jeffkohn

I disable compression when saving a TIFF from Photoshop, because LZW compression will actually make 16-bit files larger, not smaller; and ZIP compression is not support by all applications that support TIFF.

And the saves are _much_ faster (like 10x frequently) saving uncompressed than with ZIP compression. Disk space is much cheaper than my time :-). I generally save as TIFF instead of PSD because I've found a number of programs that don't handle PSD very well.

[Imagebuffet]

I usually don't use TIFF, but the Basic Photography class that I took last year at Collin College had us students saving our edits as TIFF files (on Macintosh computers using Photoshop 3).

[Murph]

I use .tiff all the time, love it, because you can take a .tiff anywhere and get it printed right away.