RAW to TIF conversion creating GINORMOUS TIF Files

Question

My wife is a photographer (Nikon D700, edits in Win7 Adobe CS5 suite) and mentioned yesterday that she's out of hard drive space. When I inspected, I found GIGANTIC .TIF files on her drive, ranging anywhere in size from 100MB to 4 GIGABYTES.

I told her to save her final edits off as JPEGS and delete the .TIFs, but she said she can't do that for two reasons:

• Her printing companies require TIF format
• If her clients want a picture redone or resized, she can't go back to the JPEG as effectively as she could have with the tif format.

Both of these reasons seem more like the product of workflow issues to me, but I don't know enough about the art to make that call. As the financier of her operation, I have a few questions for the community:

1) Are file sizes like this normal? Is there a more friendly format that she can work in that doesn't require me to buy a new hard drive every few weeks?

2) Is it possible that there is a knowledge gap somewhere and that she's missing a crucial step in her workflow? She demonstrated for me, and I watched in disbelief as a brand new 10 MB raw file without any edits turned into a 105 MB TIF file.

I ask because these file sizes seem absolutely ridiculous to me. At this rate, she'll practically have to add a hard drive surcharge to every one of her shoots from now on...

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It sounds like she's saving uncompressed TIFs. Ps will give you various options such as LZW or ZIP compression when you save. Since TIFF is lossless you can safely choose any of them. JPEG is not a good alternative as it is lossy; you will lose image quality.

Answer 2

The only thing that stands out to me is to ensure the final exported TIFFs are flattened--unless the customer or printer specifically requested layers for further processing.

Non-destructive editing is usually a necessity and thus preserving originals and/or intermediate work products in lossless formats. Working with high resolution images means you're going to need a lot of space. Just count yourself lucky your wife isn't into video production!

JPEG, even in the highest quality setting is only 8 bit and lossy, so by repeatedly importing and exporting JPEGs will result in increasingly visible artifacts and reduced flexibility due to the lower dynamic range of the 8-bit information versus the original 12-bit from the camera.

Software like Lightroom and Aperture has excellent features for managing and archiving large volumes of photos. If preserving backups of past projects is a must, then learn to use these tools, and accept that buying external hard drives now and then is par for the course in this business.

Personally, I go through three retention phases:

1. Back up all originals to DVD immediately upon importing the photos.
2. Mark all potential keepers and delete the rest.
3. After a while (a month, half a year, whenever I run out of space), delete all the potential keepers that didn't end up being used and archive the keepers on an external hard drive.

USB 2.0 is probably going to be around for yet another decade or two. With the current prices, external hard drives seems to be the most cost efficient solution for flexible long-term storage of large photo libraries.

Answer 3

Saving TIFF files doesn't make sense to me. The original RAW is more space-efficient, and of course contains all the inforation to be had. I save the original RAW file and one or more post-processed JPG results. If I want to go back and make a version that's a little darker, more snappy contrast, more detail in the clouds, or whatever, I do that by going back to the RAW file and then making another JPG with the desired tradeoffs.

I'm guessing she is saving the data in 16 bit TIFF files. That is going to be a lot bigger than the RAW for two reasons. First, the RAW contains only one color per pixel. TIFF contains all three with the other two invented somehow from the RAW information. They don't contain any more information, but do take up at least 3x the space. Second, 16 bits is more per color per pixel than RAW data, at least currently. The Nikon D3S produces 14 bits/pixel raw, and I don't think other common cameras do more than that, most less. You don't gain any information by expanding the 14 or 12 bits of raw data into 16 bits, just more wasted space.

So basically a 16 bit TIFF file expands the raw 12 or 14 bits/pixel into 48 bits/pixel without any advantage in information content.

If the printer insists on TIFF file, probably to avoid JPG compression artifacts, send them a 8 bit TIFF file after the post processing. Personally I find JPG files with lossless compression disabled to the extent possible (often done with something like a "quality" setting at 100%) don't have visible compression artifact even when pixel peeping. That is how I store my post-processed images. If someone wanted a TIFF version of one of my pictures, I'd probably just make a TIFF version from the high quality JPG file.

I just checked one of my pictures at random. D025-1756 (for my reference) is 4288 x 2844 (12.2 Mpix) pixels in size. The RAW file is 25.9 Mbytes. The post-processed JPG is 4266 x 2844 pixels and 8.1 Mbytes. A 8 bit TIFF version with forward differencing and LZW compression of the JPG, which contains exactly the same information, is 18.9 Mbyte on the disk.

The details will vary from picture to picture, but the statistics for the above picture seem to be typical in my experience.

Answer 4

TIFF files saved with Perfectly Clear plugin for Lightroom in 16-bit format are 140 MB (from ~20-24 MB RAW files). Will definitely use 8-bit conversion in future!