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According to my DSLR for dummies book, the author recommends converting Raw files to a Tiff format, as they have the least amount of compression.

My 10.2 meg Raw files turned into 57.1 meg Tiff files. Is this right?? I was expecting the file size to go down, not be 5X larger….. .



You answered your question with the first part of this statement. TIFF is an uncompressed file format, so the highest quality, but it results in very large files. The reason they are larger than the RAW files is that they have been processed (just think about all the extra data that is generated while your computer chews on the RAW file when you hit 'process').

JPEG is more than fine for all but the most critical of images. I prefer to save things that I have put significant time editing as .PSD (photoshop format) or .TIFF, as they will have no compression. I then save them as .JPG when needed. One thing of note, JPG will recompress the file each time you save... so if you open a file, save it a thousand times, then open it again there will be a decrease in quality (kinda like making serial copies of music). So the 'best' solution is a non-compressed file system (.TIFF), but for most things it really doesn't matter.

For most things, a JPG lvl12 is more than enough. The industry print standards are 300dpi saved as a .TIFF, but I've done side by side prints from JPG and TIFF and there is no noticable difference at 12x18.

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At this rate and as many pictures that I’m taking, I’m going to need a lot more memory real quick.


Honestly, storage is cheap compared to the cost of retaking many images (oh yeah, don't forget to have back-ups). Not all files need to be converted to .TIFF just for the sake of it. Keep the RAW files and process the ones you need. If you are just doing a batch processing that doesn't take much time you may just want to make a JPG and reprocess the RAW file if you ever need a non-compressed version (the nice thing about LR, etc. is they can save the settings you used to process an image to apply later).

When you start getting into serious layers, etc. you can get some really large files very quickly. I have a single image file (.PSD) that's up around 500MB... I don't even want to think about how large that would be if I converted it to a layered .TIFF file.

-Todd...