Do you recommend saving originals as TIF?

[Boodles]

I've been doing some reading about scanning/digital pics/genealogy etc - they recommend the best for saving is tif files. Much bigger they are, but particularyly for old, rare pics, this might be ideal. Then we just hoi them onto disc for backup.

I've been saving stuff as jpeg, and i see its probably not the best. I have copies of originals, on disc, but are jpeg... should i do this in tif format?

What do you guys reckon?



http://www.rideau-info.com/genealogy/digital/index.html

 

[Deenem]

TIF is lossless, JPG is lossy.

The moment you save as JPG you've lost the original, so if it's important to have the originals then you'd go with TIF's

 

[Boodles]

Yeh, I still have stacks more pics to scan, i'll do them in tif format then.

Thanks.

 

[bwana]

You're only going to notice degradation once you start re-saving jpgs. If you're not planning on editing them again then you're probably going to be fine as long as you keep the quality set to highest.

You should get smaller (than tiff) files using lossless PNG.

 

[Boodles]

I dont want to delve into this to much, but just want to clarify one or 2 more things.

When i save as tiff under my scanning program - photostudio 5.5, it gives me no further options than just 'save'.

When i save under pro studio corel paint program, it gives me options which i need to ask you guys about. I can tick any of the following compression options:
Fax-ccitt3
huffman encoding
lzw compression
packbits
uncompressed

Can i compress it a wee bit? If so which option? Or leave it uncompressed?

I tested a PNG save, which was quite smaller (half the size) than the uncompressed tiff file.

Is the quality better (than a png) in a tiff even if the tiff is compressed a bit?

Its no worries to save as tiff, but when they started throwing obscure terms for compression, its rah-rah for what the heck do i do?? lol.

 

[bwana]

Have a look at this http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html - it should answer a few of your questions wrt tiff vs png.

This http://www.scantips.com/basics9t.html covers the compression.

 

[.Froot.]

Simply save it as the biggest and best file you can (either tiff or png, I favour them both) and buy a couple of dvd's. They really aren't expensive.

 

[Boodles]

Thanks bwana, those links have cleared it up for me.

 

[semiautomatix]

Just out of interest, how do bitmaps factor into this discussion. Me, I would prefer loseless PNG or TIF.