Professional Publishing JPEG vs. RAW vs. TIFF

I am planning to get a D60 in the near future and will be publishing some of the pictures. I'm wondering if anyone could give me a quick recap of what format publishers usually ask you to submit digital images for publishing in books or magazines for example.

My assumption is that the standard is TIFF. But I am wondering if one can also work directly with the RAW and JPG formats.

Thanks for any insights and feedback you may have!--Chakkobbo

Jakob

You can shoot in whatever format you want. However, you will be doing conversions to tifs to give to your clients. I use a D30 and shoot everything jpg fine. I do a batch conversion to tif and burn a cd with both tif and jpg files to give to my clients. Hope that helps.

Ted Mishima

http://www.mishimaphotography.com

Could you briefly explain how you do a batch process from jpeg fine to tiff. I just am getting all this setup and haven't attempted that yet.

Ted Mishima said:

Jakob

You can shoot in whatever format you want. However, you will be
doing conversions to tifs to give to your clients. I use a D30 and
shoot everything jpg fine. I do a batch conversion to tif and burn
a cd with both tif and jpg files to give to my clients. Hope that
helps.

Ted Mishima

http://www.mishimaphotography.com

Click to expand...

--Mike Judge

MRJ said:

Ted Mishima said:

Jakob

You can shoot in whatever format you want. However, you will be
doing conversions to tifs to give to your clients. I use a D30 and
shoot everything jpg fine. I do a batch conversion to tif and burn
a cd with both tif and jpg files to give to my clients. Hope that
helps.

Ted Mishima

http://www.mishimaphotography.com

Click to expand...

--
Mike Judge

Click to expand...

I'm sure there are many programs that will batch process conversions. I use Thumbs Plus. This is a great little program to do things like this...
http://www.thumbs.com

--Jim DeLucoDeLuco Photographywww.delucophoto.com

Mike,

Do you have Photoshop or Corel? Either one will allow you to set up a batch converstion. Personally I've used Corel's photo-paint and found it fairly intuitive to walk through. Just had a look at photoshops just now and it seems a bit more confusing but trial and error are our friends.

Just look for the word "batch" off the "File" drop down menu in both programs. (In photoshop it's File > Automate > Batch) If you don't have either one of these programs I'd say get Photoshop you're going to need it.

S

MRJ said:

Ted Mishima said:

Jakob

You can shoot in whatever format you want. However, you will be
doing conversions to tifs to give to your clients. I use a D30 and
shoot everything jpg fine. I do a batch conversion to tif and burn
a cd with both tif and jpg files to give to my clients. Hope that
helps.

Ted Mishima

http://www.mishimaphotography.com

Click to expand...

--
Mike Judge

Click to expand...

Jakob Bovin said:

I am planning to get a D60 in the near future and will be
publishing some of the pictures. I'm wondering if anyone could
give me a quick recap of what format publishers usually ask you to
submit digital images for publishing in books or magazines for
example.

My assumption is that the standard is TIFF. But I am wondering if
one can also work directly with the RAW and JPG formats.

Thanks for any insights and feedback you may have!
--
Chakkobbo

Click to expand...

Jakob---I'd like to jump back to your original question briefly. I am a professional photographer and work on a monthly magazine. We get a lot of our outside photos e-mailed to us as jpegs. Tiffs are great, but I think the tiff/jpeg issue is more a matter of how you store your images. I always try to save images that will be reused as tiffs and then make a jpeg version for e-mailing. Although I have sent tiffs (on a zip or CD) to other publications, e-mailed jpegs will usually work unless you are dealing with really large images, say 5MB jpegs. Then a zip or CD with tiffs would be the format of choice. Hope this helps. Ed

For Photoshop, here's the basic process to make it do batch processing:

1) Make a Photoshop action with the task that you want it to do. Have it open a file, do whatever you want and then save another file (the file will be overridden in the batch process, so it can be any valid image file). You can add IPTC data here if you want, add profiles, etc.

2) Go to the batch command (as the previous poster noted) and select the action in the 'Play' section. Set the source as 'Folder' and select a source folder (ie open all of the image files in this folder and apply the action to them). Check off the 'Override Action Open Commands' box. Do the same for the destination block (of course selecting a different destination directory and the 'Override Save in commands' box instead of the 'open' box). Setup the naming conventions in the next box. Press OK and the batch processor will then step through your actions on each and every file.

Personally, I use this for going the other way - Bibble converts the RAW images to 16-bit/channel TIFFs, then I use Photoshop to batch process the TIFFs down to 8-bit JPEGs, add IPTC information, etc. I also use a second batch process to then generate low-res previews converted to sRGB for sending editors to select which pictures they want.

Scott LaFond said:

Do you have Photoshop or Corel? Either one will allow you to set
up a batch converstion. Personally I've used Corel's photo-paint
and found it fairly intuitive to walk through. Just had a look at
photoshops just now and it seems a bit more confusing but trial and
error are our friends.

Just look for the word "batch" off the "File" drop down menu in
both programs. (In photoshop it's File > Automate > Batch) If you
don't have either one of these programs I'd say get Photoshop
you're going to need it.

S

MRJ said:

Ted Mishima said:

Jakob

You can shoot in whatever format you want. However, you will be
doing conversions to tifs to give to your clients. I use a D30 and
shoot everything jpg fine. I do a batch conversion to tif and burn
a cd with both tif and jpg files to give to my clients. Hope that
helps.

Ted Mishima

http://www.mishimaphotography.com

Click to expand...

--
Mike Judge

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Ted Mishima said:

Jakob

You can shoot in whatever format you want. However, you will be
doing conversions to tifs to give to your clients. I use a D30 and
shoot everything jpg fine. I do a batch conversion to tif and burn
a cd with both tif and jpg files to give to my clients. Hope that
helps.

Ted Mishima http://www.mishimaphotography.com

Click to expand...

Thanks TED!

In other words, there is no major quality loss in doing these conversions from a printing/production perspective. I guess I was under the impression that one should work with TIFF ONLY to maintain top quality. So what about RAW is it of any use?
--Chakkobbo

Ed Keys said:

Jakob Bovin said:

I am planning to get a D60 in the near future and will be
publishing some of the pictures. I'm wondering if anyone could
give me a quick recap of what format publishers usually ask you to
submit digital images for publishing in books or magazines for
example.

My assumption is that the standard is TIFF. But I am wondering if
one can also work directly with the RAW and JPG formats.

Thanks for any insights and feedback you may have!

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Ed Keys said:

Jakob---I'd like to jump back to your original question briefly. I
am a professional photographer and work on a monthly magazine. We
get a lot of our outside photos e-mailed to us as jpegs. Tiffs are
great, but I think the tiff/jpeg issue is more a matter of how you
store your images. I always try to save images that will be reused
as tiffs and then make a jpeg version for e-mailing. Although I
have sent tiffs (on a zip or CD) to other publications, e-mailed
jpegs will usually work unless you are dealing with really large
images, say 5MB jpegs. Then a zip or CD with tiffs would be the
format of choice. Hope this helps. Ed

Click to expand...

Thanks ED!

As said to another response to my original question, I guess this means one should not have significant quality concerns, except when reenhancing and saving a JPG multiple times.--Chakkobbo

Jakob,

Shooting raw definetly has it's advantages. I just don't have the time or inclination to have to convert raw to 16 bit tif, manipulate, then convert to 8 bit tif to manipulate some more. You can definetly stretch your fine tuning much farther this way, but quite frankly, I do not need it.

I use photoshop to batch process my images. It is a great feature to have the automation that these types of programs allow.

Ted Mishima

http://www.mishimaphotography.com

So what about RAW is it of any use?

Not to the publication.

Think of RAW as a negative from which you make a final image. The publication is unlikely to know what to do with a RAW file. They are even further unlikely to have software to even view it. But RAW is the best file from which you can make the final image of the best quality.

Your RAW files hopefully do not have any sharpening, contrast, saturation changes made in the camera, so if your client could convert a RAW image, they would not like what they see. Flat, unsharp, and if it's linear, pretty dark.

But you! You are a magic image maker , and you'll take that file and make a great tiff out of it. You may deliver it as a JPG if you are sending it as an email attachment, but I will try to deliver a CD or FTP a tiff so I don't insult the file with compression. It DOES make a difference to me. Further, I think a lot of designers, when provided a JPEG will foolishly keep the file a JPEG after sizing it, thereby compounding the confounding compression. When provided with a tiff, they'll keep it as a tiff. The level of ignorance is amazing. At very high levels.

So I'll take a RAW mode camera file, convert it to 16/tiff, edit, (as much as possible in 16 bit) and save as a PSD document. That's my master file. From that file, I'll pull copies that I'll further manipulate, convert to 8 bit, size, USM and deliver. Or size, USM, and save as JPEG, then deliver.

For any subsequent images that are not for the identical use, I'll return back to the original 16/tiff PSD file and do it again.

Make sense?

p
--www.paulmbowers.com

Jakob Bovin wrote:
So what about RAW is it of any use?

Well having just gotten Capture 2 after finally finding it I can tell you that for fudge room down the road I'll be capturing everything I shoot in NEF format. All the original data used to calculate the shot is still in that file and Capture 2 can use it to correct some common mistakes made, such as the wrong white balance, which is sooooo handy.

Not to mention that you have the best quality. I can't see throwing data away unless you're in a spot for storage room.

S