Hebee Jeebes wrote:
Adobe is however recommending that people start using TIFF instead of PSD. Many years down the line they could decide to drop it. TIFF is more standard anyways and offers better compression options.
[snip]
It is disputable whether Adobe ARE doing that. But who here seriously imagines that Adobe will try to release an upgrade to Photoshop in future that can’t READ today’s PSDs?
First, what would be the technical justification? Code exists to read a PSD file and turn it into Photoshop’s internal representation, with layers, channels, etc. Are they going to remove some of those features, making such code impossible? Now THAT would be a much bigger topic!
And what would happen to sales of the upgrade? And to Adobe’s reputation? Would Adobe want to try to sell a product that couldn’t read vast numbers of millions of image files that many of its direct competitors can read?
I have no trouble believing that in future Adobe will gently steer people towards using TIFF, perhaps by changing defaults, and even adding features to TIFF that are not in PSD. (Although I have no evidence they plan that). But I can’t imaging a future Photoshop release not being able to read the PSDs its predecessors have written.
(And I certainly expect to see other products exploiting DNG, including Linear DNG, far more than now, using "metadata editing" rather than "rendered pixel editing". If I am using an Adobe product in 5 years time that wan’t save to PSD, it is more likely to be because I have switched to metadata editing and no longer use Photoshop).
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Barry Pearson
http://www.barry.pearson.name/photography/