JPEG vs TIFF

Dandelion Head in Dew. Shot in JPEG on a 6MP Nikon D40 by my wife. Enlarged 600% in Photoshop, then reduced to 660px width 72dpi.

Are you a serious print professional? Prepress, Printer, Commercial Photographer or maybe Ad Designer for print? As a serious print professional do you insist on high quality TIFF files for all photos? Do you sneer inside when some hack...err...that is customer sends in a JPEG attached to their .indd? Or advise your clients that they might want to consider a more-professional Professional Photographer?

I did. I was raised in a work environment that featured top of the top shelf print photography and separation. When the transition from Scitex to Macintosh came along (see "Scitex," below), TIFF was the only acceptable format to replace the Scitex CT format (except PSD). In fact, it was always standard protocol when supplied with a JPEG to convert it immediately to TIFF – if the customer could not be prevailed upon to resupply us with a TIFF replacement – as if that conversion was going to magically impart something that hadn't been there in the JPEG!

Well, for one thing, just look at the file size: 60MB for a high res TIFF vs 2MB for an equivalent JPEG? Obviously you are losing an awful lot in the translation! And in truth we have all seen JPEGs pushed beyond the limits of decency for the sake of file compression, producing images that look as though they are composed of glass masonry blocks instead of pixels. Add to that the prevailing industry prejudice against JPEGs and it can appear that there is no excuse for anybody using the foolish little things. It has been an unquestionable tenet of Good Prepress.

So you might imagine the look on my supervisor's face a few years back when I suggested to him that we might run tests to see if we could actually replace our overstuffed TIFFs with the much more efficient JPEG. It looked a lot like the look on my face when that idea was first put to me.

If you do any web based research at all about Nikon DSLRs – as I did around that time prior to purchasing the wonderful Nikon D40 – you are bound to encounter Ken Rockwell. For those of you who have not, Rockwell is a photographer and unabashed Nikon aficionado who obviously spends all his waking hours writing on his photography-blog-on-steroids www.kenrockwell.com. Part photography class, part hardware review site, part family album, and part op-ed page, Rockwell posts reams of photography related material every day.

After years of refusing to make the expensive switch to digital, I had finally seen that digital photography was reaching the convergence of affordability and quality that would impel my wife and I to abandon our beloved Pentax K1000s and take the plunge. I had seen the pitiful results of a $1000+ Sony digicam my mother had purchased years back, and had been repeatedly frustrated – whenever in contact with any digital camera of any expense range – by the lack of control over the operation of the camera, the futility of trying to get a good shot while holding the thing in midair trying to view with the screen, and the absolute refusal of such cameras to simply take the shot at the moment that you actually pushed the button. Megapixels kept climbing up the marketing ladder by the millions, but the photographs still looked like some Flintstones gerbil was in there chipping it out with a set of Crayolas.

To explain my aversion to the digicams, I may need to back up a little. When my wife and I were first married (24 years ago), my parents or grandparents kindly gave us a little Kodak Disc camera. It was very thoughtful gift that would allow us to get photos of our budding family right from the very first. The only problem was, after seeing the results, I put it in a drawer and almost never got it out. In fact, after a while I couldn't even find where it was. Later someone gave us a 35mm snapshot camera, but the only real difference I could see was that the film was more expensive. It soon joined the Disc camera in the Lost Drawer. Later someone tried again with a 35mm point and shoot that had auto advance and a couple of levers, but the results were quite the same. While explaining the situation to a colleague, he asked, "Have you ever tried an SLR?" I'd never even heard of an SLR, but we soon went out and bought our first K1000, and we've been confirmed shutterbugs ever since. (In fact, one reason we never advanced beyond the K1000s in film cameras is that my wife literally shot so much film even with a manual advance that I had little time to shoot on my own for re-supplying her.) So there could never be any thought of accepting pitiful photo quality for the convenience of going filmless; I knew the digicam would quickly find its way to the Lost Drawer.

Then came the DSLRs. It was still a bit hard to part with $1000+ when you could pick up a K1000 for less than $100 and there were tons of great Asahi lenses dirt cheap. I even enjoyed shooting with my older Pentax Spotmatic using the Sunny 16 rule, but the truth was that we were much more apt to shoot than to develop film, and it was always stacked up in our refrigerator. DSLRs had large sensors (for a digital camera), and good quality photos. It was almost time to make the switch, and we wanted to make sure we picked the right DSLR.

One criterion I had my mind set on was that it had to shoot TIFFs, and preferably shoot RAW. So when I read Ken Rockwell's assertion that shooting in TIFF is a waste of space, and RAW was a waste of space and time, I figured he didn't have anything else to say that I needed to listen to. But just in case, it might not hurt to run a few tests...

Well let me tell you, having run test targets nine ways to Sunday, if you are using TIFF, you are completely wasting your storage space. I know that storage is cheap these days compared to years gone by, but waste is waste. Take any high resolution TIFF, shot or scanned, convert it to JPEG at a quality of 10, and you will not be able to tell the difference. Enlarge it. Print it. Make a contract quality proof. Take it to press. I have no idea what in the world TIFF is doing with all that space it takes up, but the truth is that it's not packing in all kinds of extra quality that will show up somewhere down the line. Even at a JPEG quality of 8 it's really tough to find a difference. For sure you don't want to use middle or low quality JPEGs, but come on, 50 extra MBs? At a profession print related shop that quickly adds up to a lot of wasted gigs...a whole lot of wasted gigs. And work or home, wasted disk space is wasted copy time and wasted money in storage hardware.

Think of it this way: pretty much any photo for print or web or personal use is going to be 8-bit anyway, not 16-bit. So it's not like your going to capture all kinds of super-high artistic level quality to begin with. If you're going to print, whether commercial print or just a little Epson photo printer, it's going to be printed in CMYK so you're going to lose a lot from your 8-bit RGB gamut that is there. Even if you stay in RGB for display on the Web you're going to convert to a limited resolution file of around 72dpi (even 300dpi for print is actually a limited resolution) so you're still going to lose image quality. Any way you slice it, these uses are not going to exhaust the quality of a good JPEG unless you need to enlarge far (I mean real far) beyond what was originally shot, and TIFF won't help you there anyway.

Now, if you have a situation where you are scanning (or shooting) at extreme resolution in 16-bit, then you have a necessity for TIFFs, but that just isn't very common. I used to work on images for Delta airlines where the imaging was done at a very high end studio in Atlanta. They were scanning in (probably large format) photography in high res 16-bit, retouching and tweaking color to create beautiful, beautiful images of Delta planes in billowing clouds at sunrise or sunset, filled with stunning purples and crimsons and so forth. Then they were outputting these images on a film recorder to actually produce large format transparencies – as though they had been shot that way on a large format camera. It was all very wonderful except that when we scanned these transparencies for print we produced high quality CMYK scans. The jump from extremely high res 16-bit RGB to 300dpi 8-bit CMYK is quite significant, and the ad agency could never understand why the proofs didn't have all those out-of-gamut purples and crimsons no matter how much time we spent on it. (They wasted barrels of money getting these things made, and then barrels more trying to match the impossible.)

Run some tests. Save yourself some time, space, and money.


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