Saving Photoshop !!

[josel]

Hi all,

I have been told that TIFF lossless, is the best format to save your work for the best quality. But others say use the photoshop PDF. I am not bothered about file sizes, just want to save my images to the highest quality, so which is the best one to use and what are the pro's and cons?

Cheers Josel

[dcloud]

Even at 100% quality, the JPEG format is lossy, and in compression it loses a slight amount of image clarity. For printed work, especially when graphics are imported into page layout programs such as QuarkXPress, Adobe InDesign or Adobe Pagemaker, lossless TIFF or EPS files are the formats of choice.

Even though more and more programs can import native Photoshop PSD files, using PSD files when importing to layout programs is not your best option. When you save a file as a PSD, Photoshop will save a flattened composite version of the image as part of the .PSD file. When you save as a TIFF or EPS, the size of the image will be smaller and your file will be recognized by nearly all programs set up to work with bitmapped images. You should always save your Photoshop file as a TIFF or EPS (or DCS2, a special kind of EPS, for spot color jobs), if you plan to import your artwork into a page layout program.

TIFF, or Tagged Image File Format, makes a flattened, lossless bitmapped graphics file that (if properly saved) contains the exact pixel information of the original PSD. According to Photoshop Help: TIFF is a flexible bitmap image format supported by virtually all paint, image-editing, and page-layout applications. Also, virtually all desktop scanners can produce TIFF images.

A TIFF can include alpha channels, clipping paths, annotations, ICC profiles, and most Photoshop image modes.TIFF files were designed as an open format, permitting the importing program to access information to edit the image. You can apply a color to a grayscale TIFF file, apply a special halftone screen, crop the image and downsample it to a different resolution.

Of late, Adobe has been tinkering with the standard, workhorse TIFF format, developing an Advanced TIFF format that includes layers and lossy compression. I would recommend that you stick with the standard TIFF format.

[exerpt taken from http://www.santarosa.edu/~bheiman/73_31_online/lectures/lec16.html]

- dc