Tiffs-to LZW or not to LZW

EG
Posted By
Ed_Geis
Jul 28, 2006
Views
383
Replies
8
Status
Closed
My standard practice for saving images in Photoshop for press has long been to use the TIFF format with LZW compression–being a lossless compression method, I figured LZW would reduce file sizes without degrading the image. Results have always been good.

Recently, though, I had a service provider request that I leave my TIFFs uncompressed, and their opinion was that LZW affected image quality. I was a little surprised, but chalked it up to hyper-caution on their part.

Then the other week I was reading an Adobe guidebook and it said to leave TIFFs uncompressed also when placing into InDesign for press.

What’s the story on this? What are other people doing?
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BL
Bob Levine
Jul 28, 2006
I don’t even use TIFs anymore. Just unflattened PSDs. That’s just one of the benefits of using InDesign over any other pagelayout application.

That said, LZW is lossless. The only problem I know of was with PS 7.0 TIFs where the files actually got messed up…on screen and in print. That was fixed with 7.0.1.

With the cost of storage being what it is, I don’t personally see any need for compressing files anymore….of course, I’m a one man shop.

Bob
CN
Cybernetic Nomad
Jul 28, 2006
If the service provider is a photolab:

Some minilabs and other photo imagers process TIFF files directly (ie, you just copy them over) but won’t accept compressed TIFF files. They may just want to avoid the work of resaving them as uncompressed TIFFs.
TT
Toby_Thain
Jul 28, 2006
Certainly LZW is lossless.

With respect to the "placed images" question, compression does complicate random access to image data, as is required by InDesign or any layout application. ID probably does enough smart caching to make the effect negligible though.
BL
Bob Levine
Jul 28, 2006
If you’re using InDesign there’s no need to be using TIFs anyway. The only time I use them is if they’re client supplied and require no work.

Bob
RP
Russell_Proulx
Jul 30, 2006
If you’re using InDesign there’s no need to be using TIFs anyway. The only time I use them is if they’re client supplied and require no work.

It’s really quite funny (not!)how much confusion in the marketplace is being injected by Adobe and their minions:

Jeff Schewe writes: "Actually, PSD is not longer the "preferred" Photoshop format. Tiff, since Photoshop 7 can save EVERYTHING that a PSD file can save-as long as you save layered tiffs and has the advantage of having better file compression using zip compression than PSD using run length encoding."

see: < http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm ?catid=593&threadid=1175025&enterthread=y#4210590>

So, it would appear that Adobe might soon according to Lightroom’s development) replace PSDs with ‘funky Tiffs’ that only work with modern apps and are not supported by older software (so much for a universal standard – standards can change if you own them…)

Hmm… next thing we know Forgent will win the right to change the JPG standard…

Seems that the world belongs to marketing folks and their clever ideas on how to leverage yadda with yadda..

Russell
BL
Bob Levine
Jul 30, 2006
Truth be told, the best format to use is PDF (best to add the PDP file extension). That will retain everything everything including vector data and type. Those will be rasterized by InDesign using TIF or PSD.

Bob
EG
Ed_Geis
Jul 31, 2006
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and practices on this.

I often just toss .psd files into my ID layouts during initial layout, but when I do the final CMYK conversions I still save as TIFF since I figure a smaller resulting file will be a little easier for the folks ripping the file in prepress.

But maybe I should just abandon the TIFFs at this point.

Never thought about doing the PDF thing–will have to give it a try sometime.

Not sure what the point is of Russel’s post, by the way…unless just to take a dig at the big A.
RP
Russell_Proulx
Jul 31, 2006
Not sure what the point is of Russell’s post, by the way…unless just to take a dig at the big A.

Robert encourages the use of PSDs while a thread in the Lightroom Beta forum claims that the layered Tiff is the preferred way to go… just reacting to the inconsistency/confusion.

Ok… so I was in a whinny/complaining mood. Must be the heat.

Sorry.

Russell 🙂

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