TIFF vs RAW vs DNG vs PSD RAW files contain the data captured by the camera sensor. This data cannot be modified. There is no single RAW file format. Each camera manufacturer has one or more unique RAW formats. A second, much smaller file (sidecar file) contains instructions for the RAW processor to change exposure, saturation etc. The sidecar data can be changed but the original sensor data is still there. DNG files are RAW files that have been converted to an Adobe proprietary format. The sensor data has not been changed. DNG also had a sidecar file that can be changed. PSD is a proprietary Adobe format that contains edited sensor data. The original sensor data is no longer available. TIFF contains the same data as PSD but the file is a public domain format. PSD and Tiff files are not compressed in a lossy manner. They can be opened and edited without introducing additional compression artifacts each time. If you want to have the original camera data available then pick RAW or DNG. If you want the edited data then pick PSD or TIFF. If you are sure that you will never ever modify the images again then convert to the smaller jpeg format. The choice of which one to pick is usually based on some unsupported speculation that one or the other may not be supported in the future.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Apr 2014 08:26:40 +0000
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