Should i convert my JPG photos to TIF files 1st if I want to work on them in more than 1 editing program?

Question

Apologies for being quite new to this, but i want to get it right.

I've have 100's of JPG photo's. I want to use 1 computer editing program to adjust the levels, and another for healing and red eye etc. I'm a little concerned about image quality loss when saving them to JPG's from 1 program to the next.

After looking on Google, am I right in thinking that it would be best to convert them all to TIF files 1st, and then not having to worry about compression and quality loss, and then when i'm finally finished editing in all the programs just to finally convert them back to finished JPG's?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Using a lossless format as an intermediate format is indeed the best solution. Better still would be to shoot raw and save jpg untill you're totally finished

Answer 2

No. I already told you this!!!! It would be pointless to convert an already compressed format like jpeg to a tiff. It's already compressed, so even after converting it to a tiff it would still suffer the same loss.



Most image editors can work with JPEGs no problem, so adding an extra step would be utterly pointless. However repeatedly editing and saving jpegs would compromise the quality. If you have made an edit of a jpeg, you should save it in the image editors native format to preserve layers/transparency/effects etc. If you need to open it in another image editor that uses a different format you could indeed use Tiff, some image editors also support Photoshop's PSD format which is also lossless.



Start with Tiffs yes (or even better RAW), save as Tiffs yes (or even your image editors native lossless format such as Photoshop's PSD or GIMP's XCF), then convert to Jpeg only when you need to.

Answer 3

It would be best to set your camera to store the images in RAW format to completely avoid loss of quality. But yes, if you're going to be working in several different programs, TIF would be a good format to use. You can always keep the original unmodified JPEG as a backup. But really, look into using RAW - no professional should ever use JPEG for anything other than putting images online.

Answer 4

converting JPEG's to TIFF's would make no difference - JPEG's are compressed files... you can't put information IN...



converting RAW to TIFF or to PNG would be better...