Best file format for archiving

What is the best file format, i.e., jpeg, tiff, bitmap, to use to archive photos to cd?. I am currently using bitmap on photos I scanned with my Epson 2450. I tried tiff format but the size of the file is even larger than bitmap file. I understand jpeg is not reccommended because of the compression.

Ralph Hopper said:

What is the best file format, i.e., jpeg, tiff, bitmap, to use to
archive photos to cd?. I am currently using bitmap on photos I
scanned with my Epson 2450. I tried tiff format but the size of
the file is even larger than bitmap file. I understand jpeg is not
reccommended because of the compression.

Click to expand...

The best file format and its quality is depended on your saving purpose. For backup (may be you will edit it next time), I suggest you using uncompressed or lossless TIFF format, it is larger than JPEG but it will not loss informations. Another reason why TIF is that it can be opened on Mac, Linux, and other platform easily but Bmp is a picture format on Windows only.

Highly recommend the software which can choose the best saving format and quality for you by your purpose. visit http://www.stepok.com/Eng/Tphoto/index.htm

You should definitely use a lossless format like TIFF, PSD or PNG.

When you use TIFF (as many professionals do because it is a real standard) you can use ZIP compression which gives you about 30% to 60% compression rate - and ZIP is better than LZW compression because it is not infirnged by any patents and hence supported by a wide variety of applications, both shareware/freeware and 'porfessional' software.

All formats also support 48 Bit color depth (16 bits per channel) so you won't loose any of the color information delivered by your scanner (which usually deliver 12 bits per channel, or even 16 bits per channel).

Scanning at high-resolution gives you the best possible quality to keep in your archive. You can resize from there at any time when you need something for the web, or for sharing with your friends and family.

Another forum vendor pointed out recently that it may be not worth it to keep always the highest resolution when you scan images, at least when you know that you usually only need the images for the web, or for family photo sharing. You can always scan the original image again at the highest possible resolution when you need a print-ready master or something...

--
Mario Westphal
Author of IMatch - The Digital Image Management Solution
[email protected]
http://www.photools.com

stepok said:

Ralph Hopper said:

What is the best file format, i.e., jpeg, tiff, bitmap, to use to
archive photos to cd?. I am currently using bitmap on photos I
scanned with my Epson 2450. I tried tiff format but the size of
the file is even larger than bitmap file. I understand jpeg is not
reccommended because of the compression.

Click to expand...

The best file format and its quality is depended on your saving
purpose. For backup (may be you will edit it next time), I suggest
you using uncompressed or lossless TIFF format, it is larger than
JPEG but it will not loss informations. Another reason why TIF is
that it can be opened on Mac, Linux, and other platform easily but
Bmp is a picture format on Windows only.

Highly recommend the software which can choose the best saving
format and quality for you by your purpose. visit
http://www.stepok.com/Eng/Tphoto/index.htm

Click to expand...

Ralph Hopper said:

What is the best file format, i.e., jpeg, tiff, bitmap, to use to
archive photos to cd?. I am currently using bitmap on photos I
scanned with my Epson 2450. I tried tiff format but the size of
the file is even larger than bitmap file. I understand jpeg is not
reccommended because of the compression.

Click to expand...

--
Ralph H

Ralph Hopper said:

Ralph Hopper said:

What is the best file format, i.e., jpeg, tiff, bitmap, to use to
archive photos to cd?. I am currently using bitmap on photos I
scanned with my Epson 2450. I tried tiff format but the size of
the file is even larger than bitmap file. I understand jpeg is not
reccommended because of the compression.

Click to expand...

--
Ralph H

Click to expand...

Thanks very much for your suggestions.
--
Ralph H