Save to tif?

<p>Quite some time ago, when I was scanning some old family B/W prints with my Epson Photo FB scanner, I saved them as tif instead of jpg because I read quality and editing would be better. Now I have selected one to e-mail and tried to save it as jpg in PS Emements, but the save menu in this case does NOT offer jpg!! Only offers 2 types of ps files, and a host I've never heard of like pct, pcx,gif, etc. even RAW! I could swear I have converted other scanned tif files to jpg, but those were color prints.</p>

<p>Why I hate computers! In more recent times, I have made up my mind to just save as jpg and function only in jpg in order to save myself from so much fiddle-frustration to sap more time from my remaining years. When I likewise shoot with my Pentax DSLR cameras, I select jpg for the same reason. I have used RAW infreqently. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>They were probably saved as 16-bit tiff. You have to convert them to 8-bit for jpeg. If it's the same in Elements as CS4, go to image>mode and click on 8-bits/channel. Then you should see Jpeg in the save menu.<br>

<br />-Jon</p>

<p>Thanks Jon- I will give that a try!</p>

<p>MK</p>

<p>I brought up "Mode" but no bits were given. I think that is because my version of PSE does not handle 16 bits to begin with. But another category under "Mode" was "indexed color" (?) which was checked, even though this is a B/W photo. I changed that to RGB color, and then I got jpg in the save menu!! Thanks, Jon, for putting me on the right track! I hope I can remember this little trick. This stuff is too cluelessly touchy-tech complex for my taste! </p>

<p>MK</p>

<p>Glad to be of help. I don't know anything about indexed color, but it does have to be in RGB.<br>

-Jon</p>

<p>I believe 'indexed color' refers to a (small) fixed-size palette, usually 16- (4-bit) or 256-color (8-bit), not to be confused with the 8-bit JPEG. 8-bit JPEG has 8 bits per channel (RGB), for 24-bits per pixel total. This 'indexed color' is usually only 8 or 16 bits (or fewer) per pixel, enough to point to a color in a small palette that contains all the colors in use for the entire image. It's most used now for GIF format, not particularly suitable for photo-quality.</p>

<p>Also, I should mention that some programs (including Adobe) may have separate 'Save As' and 'Export' or 'Save for Web' commands that may provide additional flexibility and might have allowed saving direct-to-JPEG.</p>

<p>I just pulled up on old Tiff color photo in Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, checked the File -> Save As menu, and it showed JPEG as the 5th menu list. What version of PSE are you running?</p>

<p>Can you post one of your Tiff images to this thread?</p>

<p>A work-around would be to use a free program like Irfanview, which should have no problems reading your Tiff image, do some basic image manipulations, and then save that back out to one of many image formats, including JPEG. Irfanview is an easy download and install on practically any Windows system.</p>

<p>It's kind of interesting reading all the ways to save. The way I save for the web in Photoshop is; convert to sRGB, convert to 8-bit, flatten image, and place the watermark. All that is in an action. Then manually I resize the image and sharpen, then save as jpeg.<br>

I guess I go around the long way, shooting RAW, converting to DNG (because CS2 won't read the camera RAW files), neutralizing the image in ACR, then processing in CS2. Followed by saving. Although lately I don't save many images other than raw and for the web because a single tiff or psd file is usually about 150 mb unless I flatten all the layers.</p>

<p>-Jon</p>