Prints from TIFF files...

[derrickdehaan]

Hope this is the right forum for this. Say I were to take a digital copy of some

photos to the local camera/print shop. I know they can produce prints from JPEG

files, but what about TIFF files? Any benifit using a TIFF file rather than a JPEG?

Perhaps they could even print from a RAW file?

 

Thanks for your time,

 

Derrick

[vincedistefano]

You're best off just using sRGB jpeg images. No benefit to Tif that I can think of, and I'd be surprised if most places would want to deal with your RAW files.

[derrickdehaan]

Vince, thanks for the timely response.

[ann_clancy6]

a high end commercial house could print from a tiff file, but not your local corner shop.

 

no one prints in raw.

 

i always print from tiff, but then i never use jpegs for anything so my opinion is based on that reality.

[Ed_Ingold]

My local Wolf Camera can print from TIFF or JPEG files, Adobe RGB or sRGB. They may be an exception, but it illustrates you can't make generalities.

 

That said, there's no reason to submit anything other than JPEG files in sRGB - they are universally accepted. It is important that you crop and size the JPEGs to the final output. The lab may not always crop and resample the files in a competent manner.

[steve_dunn2]

<p>There's really no reason to print photographic images from a TIFF rather than a JPEG.</p>

 

<p>If you find a place that can print from either TIFF or JPEG on the same printing equipment, try this experiment. When you're finished editing one of your images, save it as a TIFF. Now, without making any other changes, save another copy of it as a highest-quality JPEG. Get your printing shop to make one print from each image. Now, without reading the back (where the shop probably printed the filename), see if you can tell the two prints apart. Betcha can't tell which is which. Show 'em to several friends or colleagues, and I doubt they'll be able to figure out which one is a TIFF and which one is a JPEG, either.</p>

 

<p>You probably want to keep master copies of your images as TIFFs (or some other lossless format). But top-quality* JPEGs work just fine when you're taking/sending your images to wherever you get them printed. They'll be smaller, can be printed anywhere (whereas not all places will print TIFFs), and you won't see any difference in the final print.</p>

 

<p>*: there is no part of the JPEG standard which defines a numeric scale for quality levels. Heck, even different parts of some programs use different scales; for instance, Photoshop uses 12 as its highest quality for Save but 100 as its highest quality for Save For Web. You should be safe to use your program's highest quality setting, whatever that is, when saving a JPEG copy to be used to make prints. You may be safe with a slightly lower quality setting; if you want to save some space, you'll have to experiment with your software and see if you're happy with the results of something slightly below the highest quality setting.</p>

[Richard Williams]

My local place does tiff too, but the only difference seems to be the painfully slow upload times into their creaky system. Whatever you use, always convert to sRGB unless you're using a pro lab that can provide you with a specific profile. A few specialist labs offer (very expensive) raw conversions, but I doubt that any routinely print from raw.

[Ed_Ingold]

JPEG compression is subject to a wide degree of interpretation. Nonetheless if you copy a TIFF master file to an high-quality JPEG, sized so that it does not need to be up-sampled by the lab, there are no visible compression artifacts. If all the sizing, color and sharpening adjustments are in place, you can instruct the lab to not add any corrections (NNNN) and expect good results. This avoids the "problem" of operators with little photographic experience who add corrections to meet their own distorted expectations.