Why TIF to Print?

David Habercom wrote in
news::

Can anyone explain why TIF is a better format for printing? Or it is? Thanks.

Or is it? Or ain’t it?

—
v=b

in article , David
Habercom at wrote on 08/23/2004 1:12 PM:

Can anyone explain why TIF is a better format for printing? Or it is? Thanks.

http://www.asmp.org/u_faq/about_formats.php

"David Habercom" wrote in message

Can anyone explain why TIF is a better format for printing? Or it is?

Compared to What? Short answer: if someone is sending you the file then you want one that’s got all the detal you can use. JPG files aren’t (really) a nice way of working with images, nor are GIFs. What you probably want is an uncompressed image, or compressed TIF, or processor-native (for example, native application (photoshop) format) for printing. A (nominal) "dpi" of 260 is good. Some will undoubtedly argue for higher "rez", but I gather you are using the average home printer. True?

Can anyone explain why TIF is a better format for printing?

Better than what? For printing how?

If by "for print" you mean "for printing out on my home inkjet printer," TIFF is no better than any other format.

If by "for print" you mean "for printing on a printing press," then the only file formats really appropriate for professional printing are TIFF, EPS, and Scitex CT. Other formats, such as BMP or JPEG or GIF, are intended only for low-quality, low-resolution images; are RGB only; degrade the quality of the image; or all of the above.

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Art, literature, shareware, polyamory, kink, and more:
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

Just a slight correction…
Jpeg ‘can’ be CMYK… (unfortunetly…)

n8

If by "for print" you mean "for printing on a printing press," then the

only

file formats really appropriate for professional printing are TIFF, EPS,

and

Scitex CT. Other formats, such as BMP or JPEG or GIF, are intended only

for

low-quality, low-resolution images; are RGB only; degrade the quality of

the

image; or all of the above.

—
Art, literature, shareware, polyamory, kink, and more:
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

Hi David – this is a good question and I can see from the responses you have had already that you have some very, very good replies.

Rather than repeat what has already been writ I would like to add: there are basically 2 main forms of onscreen images
a) rasterised and b) vectorised

a) is probably associated with colored pixels. So, for example, in a straight green line across a whote background each pixel is independent of its neighbour. The problems used to be that is the image was shown at anything other than 100% original size then pixels had to be added or subtracted to display onscreen (and probably to print as well). That creates problems cos there needs to be some way to handle the loss or gain of pixels and retain image fidelity

b) these are usually the type of images that can be scaled very easily because a straight line can be represented as a box with 4 corners, an inner fill color (green in this example) and an outer fill color (whote in this example)

I daresay that the same holds true when printing and this is where smart printer drivers are needy things.

It gets even more complicated when you start to add ways methods and algorithms to minimise image size and retain image fidelity at the same time. FWIW TIF used to be the professional standard for hi-level image processing on very hi quality (and cost) workstations and monitors.

There are lots of different image formats because there are lots of different functions attached to those formats

I hope I have not clouded the issue but explained enough to show that it is complicated, intriguing and fascinating all at the same time

Artio

"David Habercom" wrote in message

Can anyone explain why TIF is a better format for printing? Or it is? Thanks.

—
v=b

On 8/23/04 5:08 PM, n8 skow uttered:

Jpeg ‘can’ be CMYK… (unfortunetly…)

Since when? If you save as JPEG, hi-res, CMYK mode instead of saving for web?

inez

On 8/23/04 11:28 PM, iehsmith uttered:

On 8/23/04 5:08 PM, n8 skow uttered:

Jpeg ‘can’ be CMYK… (unfortunetly…)

Since when? If you save as JPEG, hi-res, CMYK mode instead of saving for web?

inez

er… sorry. I misread your post. I thought you were saying JPEG can’t be CMYK. Always worked fine for 85lpi web for the newspaper.

inez

"iehsmith" wrote in message

On 8/23/04 5:08 PM, n8 skow uttered:

Jpeg ‘can’ be CMYK… (unfortunetly…)

Since when? If you save as JPEG, hi-res, CMYK mode instead of saving for web?

🙂 Late nite read-o, right? FWIW, CMYK mode JPEG will be about 25% larger than RGB.

(Tacit) wrote in
news::

Can anyone explain why TIF is a better format for printing?

Better than what? For printing how?

If by "for print" you mean "for printing out on my home inkjet printer," TIFF is no better than any other format.

If by "for print" you mean "for printing on a printing press," then the only file formats really appropriate for professional printing are TIFF, EPS, and Scitex CT. Other formats, such as BMP or JPEG or GIF, are intended only for low-quality, low-resolution images; are RGB only; degrade the quality of the image; or all of the above.

I guess the underlying question for me is whether TIF contains useful information for my two Epsons, a 1280 & a 2200. Your depiction suggests there are only two levels: professional printing, which benefits from TIF, and low-quality home inkjet printers. In fact, with optimised profiles, paper, inksets and file quality, the 1280 & 2200 and similar inkjets, produce photographic quality prints. So the question is whether the additional data carried in a TIF can be used by such printers.

I also have an HP893cx, and you are quite correct that such printers can’t use the additional information in a TIF. In fact, seems to me it kisses off half the data in a JPG.

—
v=b

MrFrings wrote in news:BD4FA1B7.11F59E%:

http://www.asmp.org/u_faq/about_formats.php

This ASMP site clearly assumes an institutinal print environment and lumps TIF in with JPG & BMP. This is from their site:

For print–use .eps
For display–use any bitmap formats (jpeg (or jpg), tiff (or tiff), bmp, gif, psd)
For both print and display–use PICT, wmf

I should have been more clear in my first post that I am in a small photo studio and print on inkjets.

—
v=b

I guess the underlying question for me is whether TIF contains useful information for my two Epsons, a 1280 & a 2200. Your depiction suggests there are only two levels: professional printing, which benefits from TIF, and low-quality home inkjet printers. In fact, with optimised profiles, paper, inksets and file quality, the 1280 & 2200 and similar inkjets, produce photographic quality prints. So the question is whether the additional data carried in a TIF can be used by such printers.

Inkjet printers will not give better results from a TIFF than from a different format, such as BMP.

Inkjet printers, unlike printing presses, expect RGB color. The big advantage that TIFF has over common desktop formats like BMP is that TIFF supports CMYK, which you need for professional printing; BMP does not.

—
Art, literature, shareware, polyamory, kink, and more:
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

David Habercom wrote:

I guess the underlying question for me is whether TIF contains useful information for my two Epsons, a 1280 & a 2200. Your depiction suggests there are only two levels: professional printing, which benefits from TIF, and low-quality home inkjet printers. In fact, with optimised profiles, paper, inksets and file quality, the 1280 & 2200 and similar inkjets, produce photographic quality prints. So the question is whether the additional data carried in a TIF can be used by such printers.
I also have an HP893cx, and you are quite correct that such printers can’t use the additional information in a TIF. In fact, seems to me it kisses off half the data in a JPG.

Seems to me you are confusing two things:

1. What is the best file format to STORE an image, knowing it will be used in a certain way (like printing on a printing press or an inkjet printer)

2. What happens when you actually print an image.

Question number one has been answered by many, so I will not go into that. Question 2 has not been answered, so I’ll ddo that now. When you print an image, you do so from an application, such as Photoshop. Photoshop opens the image and loads it into memory. When Photoshop prints the image, it’s the image in memory that is used, not the file on your hard drive. You can prove this by opening an image from a CD, remove the CD and print the image. That works without a problem, showing you that the original file on the CD is not needed for printing. In other words: for printing it doesn’t matter what format the original file format was.

—
Johan W. Elzenga johan<<at>>johanfoto.nl Editor / Photographer http://www.johanfoto.nl/

(Tacit) wrote in
news::

I guess the underlying question for me is whether TIF contains useful information for my two Epsons, a 1280 & a 2200. Your depiction suggests there are only two levels: professional printing, which benefits from TIF, and low-quality home inkjet printers. In fact, with optimised profiles, paper, inksets and file quality, the 1280 & 2200 and similar inkjets, produce photographic quality prints. So the question is whether the additional data carried in a TIF can be used by such printers.

Inkjet printers will not give better results from a TIFF than from a different format, such as BMP.

Inkjet printers, unlike printing presses, expect RGB color. The big advantage that TIFF has over common desktop formats like BMP is that TIFF supports CMYK, which you need for professional printing; BMP does not.

Thanks for the follow-up. I will test this out fully ASAP, since I have been using large TIF files for two years. There’s no sense in using disk space to save data I can’t use.

Thanks again.

—
v=b

Thanks for the follow-up. I will test this out fully ASAP, since I have been using large TIF files for two years. There’s no sense in using disk space to save data I can’t use.

You can save TIFF files with lossless (LZW) compression.

I would not recommend saving all your TIFFs using, say, JPEG compression; JPEG is "lossy," which means it degrades the quality of the image in order to make the file smaller on disk. This degredation is permanent and irrevocable.

—
Art, literature, shareware, polyamory, kink, and more:
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

=)
The ‘unfortunet’ part stems from the hundreds of jobs I get where people swear 60% compression .jpg’s are good for ‘everything’…

=/
n8

On 8/23/04 11:28 PM, iehsmith uttered:

On 8/23/04 5:08 PM, n8 skow uttered:

Jpeg ‘can’ be CMYK… (unfortunetly…)

Since when? If you save as JPEG, hi-res, CMYK mode instead of saving for web?

inez

er… sorry. I misread your post. I thought you were saying JPEG can’t be CMYK. Always worked fine for 85lpi web for the newspaper.
inez