Which digital file format is 'best'?

[Bruce Pollock]

Which file format do you generally save your film scans in? I sort of drifted into using the .tif format but am wondering if there is advice out there which would suggest a different format is better for general use?

Maybe this is like asking which is your favourite colour......?

[Sheldon N]

TIF is the gold standard, most commonly used. It's popular because it's lossless and nondestructive.

I typically scan into 48bit color .tif's, then edit and save as a layered .PSD (photoshop) file format.

Output for the web or for other digital uses is typically to a .jpg format. I don't edit in the .jpg format, but they are a lot smaller than a .tif and I don't notice a quality difference between a high quality .jpg and a .tif at final output. Editing in .jpg is not as good, since .jpg is a compressed (destructive) format.

[Alan Davenport]

Exactly. TIF is lossless and should definitely be the format you use in-camera. JPG should only be used for saving a final product that is to be used without further editing, as the JPG codec literally throws away information every time you hit Save.

[Daniel_Buck]

tiff here as well, and my B&W files I save as greyscale, to keep the file size.

[D. Bryant]

Which file format do you generally save your film scans in? I sort of drifted into using the .tif format but am wondering if there is advice out there which would suggest a different format is better for general use?

Maybe this is like asking which is your favourite colour......?

TIF.

Don Bryant

[Frank Petronio]

Save them as Photoshop PSD files. They will be more compact, and with millions of copies of Photoshop in use, the PSD files will be an archival standard at least as far into the future as the TIF or JPG formats.

[Brian Ellis]

I edit in 16/48 bit Tiff and save the final version as 8/24 bit Tif along with the original RAW file. I'm sure PSD is as good, maybe better if as Frank says the file size is smaller without any loss of quality, but I started with Tif and that's what I've stayed with. I don't do anything in jpg except for web and emails.

[Ted Harris]

Tif ...

[Stephen Best]

TIF is the gold standard, most commonly used. It's popular because it's lossless and nondestructive.

TIFF is just a wrapper. It can be lossless or lossy ... though normally encoded as the former. It's not widely known, but JPEG can also be lossless (see Annex H of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29). TIFF is what I use for scans, mainly because it's what my scanning software supports.

[Walter Calahan]

PhotoShop format is a TIFF file, simply an Adobe proprietary version of a TIFF that has lossless compression.