Lossless methods of saving

RS
Posted By
Richard_Shayegan
Jul 17, 2004
Views
838
Replies
10
Status
Closed
I’m running Photoshop CS on a Windows XP Home SP1 machine. Of all of the methods of saving files in Photoshop CS, which are lossless? Is one lossless better than the other? Finally, when saving as a TIFF, does Photoshop save as an 8-bitt tiff or a 16-bit tiff? How about when saving RAW?
Thanks,
Richard

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DM
dave_milbut
Jul 17, 2004
if i’m not mistaken, all are lossless save jpg or tif with jpg compresson (only – lzw, zip etc are fine).
DN
DS_Nelson
Jul 17, 2004
RAW files can’t be saved. PS CS can read RAW files of many popular cameras, but after applying the various RAW adjustments, the file must be saved in one of the other formats, generally TIF or PSD (both of which are lossless).

Edit: When saving a RAW image as TIF or PSD, either 8-bit or 16-bit can be used, but keep in mind some of the PS filters won’t work in 16-bit.
DM
dave_milbut
Jul 17, 2004
most filters can be used in 16 bit in ps cs
L
LenHewitt
Jul 17, 2004
when saving as a TIFF, does Photoshop save as an 8-bitt tiff or a 16-bit
tiff? <<

If the image mode is 16-bit it will save as 16-bit, and if 8-bit as 8-bit
RS
Richard_Shayegan
Jul 18, 2004
Thanks all. Good to hear that it doesn’t dumb down the photo to 8-bit when I save. So, now I’m wondering, is there a reason to use PSD over TIFF or TIff over PSD?
Thanks,
Richard
JS
John_Slate
Jul 18, 2004
It may depend on your intended use for the files, and whether or not you utilize layers.
L
LenHewitt
Jul 18, 2004
Richard,

PSD is the only format that supports ALL Photoshop functions but very few applications can accept PSD’s. Then again, very few applications support layered TIFFs either, and even fewer support 16-bit/channel files in any format.

PSD applies a limited amount of lossless compression. TIFF can be compressed with both lossless and lossy compression methods.

Personally I would always keep ‘master files’ as PSD and save a copy in whatever format was the most suitable for the intended end-use.
B
BobLevine
Jul 18, 2004
PSD is the only format that supports ALL Photoshop functions…

I’ve had a lot of success with Photoshop PDFs.

Bob
DB
Das_Bagal
Jul 19, 2004
At a guess – do u wanna save layers as intities within the file? Yes = lock layers & save as psd
No = merge all layers and save as TIFF

I can’t say if it wrk for channels but I am sure you get the drift in this reply 🙂

dB
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Jul 19, 2004
For what it’s worth, I’ll just add that I’ve known some folks who thought GIF was a lossy format since they did indeed lose colors when they saved a high-color image to GIF. But, the difference is that GIF only supports a limited 256-color palette, so the "loss" occurs not in the saving of a file but rather in the conversion of an image to the reduced color palette beforehand.

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