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Procesing RAW images
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Hi all, I have just a couple of quick questions regarding the processing of RAW shots, I have recently done my 1st wedding for a friend of mine, I have a lot of shots in RAW mode, which processed format is best for printing – TIFF or JPEGS?
Will resizing downwards affect the printing quality?
Many Thanks !
Keith..
TIFF by a mile i never use jpgs except when posting stuff on the web. Jpegs lose some data during compression as tiff’s do not.
Will resizing downwards affect print quality? depends on how much downsizing you do and how large you want to print at. Hard drives are cheap these days, store all worked on files at full resolution as tiffs or psd files… Also store everything converted from raw in 16bit….
M
Thanks Martin, I already have some shots saved as 16bit TIFF’s. The original file width size is over 4000 pixels, I’ve reduced to 1024 pixels wide. Surely this is enough for 8 x 10″ prints?
Keith..
Sorry deleted the post by accident here it is again
1024pixel wide for a 10 inch print gives you about 100 pixels per inch (ppi) which i would think is too low, id always aim for 300ppi which is 3000pixels wide for a 10 inch print (more often than not i print at 200ppi). I think I would only go as low as 100 ppi if i was printing very large where people are going to be standing back from the image etc. Magazines i think print at around 180ppi
Again harddrives are very cheap but if space is still an issue save the files as compressed tiffs…
M
Your output format will also depend on what format the print shop take.
Some only take jpg (most of the online stores). I’ve never had problems printing jpg at 8×10 (or even much larger (A1)).
paul wrote:
Your output format will also depend on what format the print shop take.
Some only take jpg (most of the online stores). I’ve never had problems printing jpg at 8×10 (or even much larger (A1)).
Yes i agree the format depends on what format the print shop take. If I needed top quality printing a print shop that only accepts JPG’s i would not use. Dont get me wrong online printers like photobox etc are very very good and I do use them
Printing jpgs at 8×10 or even A1 will work fine most of the time. Depending on how much compression you use, the type of picture your printing or how many times you have saved the jpeg back on itself jpegs can show up noise in parts of the picture. Its always safer i think just to submit (and save) in tiff format to the print shop …
M
I’m with Martin. Disk space is cheap, downsampling master files is false economy. You screw yourself if you want to print larger than you intended later on.
If you want to save space, the thing to do is to convert from RAW in 16 bit, work on your files in that mode and then save them as 8 bit compressed (with ZIP) TIFs. This will cut the file size in half. Doing the edits first in 16 bit means you’ve saved as much quality as possible, but you don’t generally need 16 bit for output.
You’re still screwing yourself a bit if you plan on upsampling later on for really big prints, but it’s better than doing it the other way.
Cheers,
PeterPeter, Martin, Paul, Thanks very much for your comments, I’ve learned a lot already!
Keith.
Save files in PSD format for space savings and any future tweaking, when the editing is finished and ready to send to the printers save as a HQ jpg.
As soon as these files hit a modern minilab, they get crunched and compressed by the machine, I’ve tested different sizes and levels of compression and you can actually submit a fairly small image and still get an HQ 10 x 8 (500kbs). Also find a printer that can turn off the automatic “Correction” functions of the machine. Fuji Frontier printers (as used by almost everyone for high street and online printing) have an image intelligence programme that adjusts contrast, brightness, colour and sharpness.
Si
it depends on the kind of printing your doing
for example the epson 9880 is a 16 bit printer, the driver is 16 bit etc. so you get a wider range out of the printer if you send 16 bit files to it
Steve –
That is certainly true, but the quality difference printing in 16 bit makes is pretty marginal for most images. The advice would always be to work in a fully 16 bit workflow, but if the guy feels like he can’t do that for whatever reason, editing in 16 bits and saving in 8 will retain most of the quality.Cheers,
Peter
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