I Have a load of high quality photos I need to print, what format??

Question

I use a Canon 40D and shoot in RAW before fine tuning and converting to 16bit TIFF.

The files end up large, 60MB each.

I took them to a local print shop and they have told me that I need to reduce them to 8bit and convert them to JPEG

I'm confused as I thought TIFF was a standard format to print in and I deliberately kept them as 16 bit to preserve the tonal quality and overall image quality.

If I convert them to an 8bit JPEG, won't I lose quality? Why should I have to do this??

Answer 1

16-bit files are better for editing because they count a lot more intermediate tones than 8-bit images.  As has been pointed out, this implies less interpolation when you are adjusting your images in post production (which helps to prevent image quality problems, such as tonal banding when you are adjusting such items as brightness and contrast via levels and curves).  That said, most printers will print in 8-bit and once your editing is completed the usual practice is to convert your images to 8-bit (reducing storage and transmission time).  At this stage the 'extra' tones aren't needed for most output devices.

So, archive your 16-bit raw files, preferably in a non-destructive format such as DNG.  Convert them and save them as either tiffs or high quality (10-12 compression level) jpegs when it's time to print them, and save them as sRGB files if you are outputting to inkjet or via a photographic process (such as you get from a photolab).

Here's a deeper explanation - there are lots of tutorials to fully explain the issues and give you the 'how to' as done by professionals:

http://www.image-nut.com/spip.php?rubriq...

Answer 2

bitmap

Answer 3

the files are to much for their system proberly, use a prolab and they will print tiffs for you.

Po

Answer 4

The quality is only as good as the output device

Most output devices use 300-600dpi.

Any unnecessary information is not used in the final output.

Came from my fiance: he's a printer and pre-press tradesman :)