Compressing TIFF files

[foodpoison]

I did a photoshoot in Reading today, and converting some of the photos to HDR has yielded some stunning results, but the problem is, each finished HDR TIF is averaging at about 22mb.
Which obviously, is absurd.

I want to make the file size more about 7mb per picture, but I don't really know how to go about it.
Do I get rid of detail? Do I resize it?
Do I simply put it into another image editor and save it?

How do you guys do it?
Cheers.

Edit: I looked on Google, and found at that for compressing TIF files, LZW compression is lossless, so I used that. Halved the size. Figured I'll keep them at 10mb, back them up, and resize them for use on the internet.

 

[Chappers]

If you resize, then yes you'll lose detail

LZW compression does work, be careful though some printing applications can't read LZW compressed tiffs. If you want the image printed convert to good old jpeg.

To be honest I can end up with some really big files when working in Photoshop. For critical work I use 16 bit tiffs. From my 5D that gives a 70 Mb file per image. Answer, buy external hard drives for storage.. PC World love me. But saving the whole file does mean that any small changes can be done easily without having to redo all the work, which would be a pain.

 

[WildWalker]

Why don't you resize or save the images in compressed Jpeg format?

Not being funny, but why keep a 22Mb Tiff file anyway? Are you hoping to print it out the size of Peckham or something?

If its really something you want to keep, then burn it to a couple of CDs/DVDs.

 

[W.Smith]

For storage you can zip TIFFs to a fraction of their size without IQ loss. You lose the JPG's compression/decompression speed, but you retain IQ, and you gain a lot of space.

 

[DiddyDave]

I had a right laugh when I first used Capture NX's batch processing on about 350 raw files. From my D2Xs the raws are typically 19mb and the TIFFs came out at around 80mb. I'll let you do the maths on what 350 80mb images is!

So I binned that lot, and ran it again saving as top quality jpegs, 4 mb each

I basically only use jpegs and will only use raw to TIFF if an image really needs to be big as an end result. I did get a 30x40" canvas (which is huge) from a 3mb jpeg where you could count the eyelashes of the kiddie, so I'd only consider the huge TIFF files for such as Fine Art prints now



(oh, and for the maths the result was 28gb!!!)