Printing

[Little Man]

For those who shoot in RAW, when you're having photos printed do you convert from RAW to a format like TIFF, instead of JPEG, and only convert to JPEG for online/computer use?

I've got some photos that I want printing, they look nice and sharp in the Canon RAW editor. However, when I've converted them to JPEG i've noticed they've lost quality & sharpness. Even with sharpening in PS, they still don't look as clear, sharp and spot on as they do in the RAW editor before conversion.

I've been noticing this a lot these last few months, but never really given it much though as I only really use my photos online/computer. But obviously, I want the best possible result from printing, as everyone does.

Is this a common thing, or am I talking rubbish & it's my eyes?

 

[Little Man]

Right, i've sorted out what's being printed etc, and i've converted them from RAW to 16bit TIFF files. Will this be ok for printing?

 

[Chappers]

Check with whoever is doing the printing what spec they need. 16bit TIFF is a bit over the top as most printers will only handle 8 bit files.

In most cases I've found RAW converted to 8 bit JPEG with low compression works fine

 

[Little Man]

Gottcha.

Cheers mate.

 

[photon]

Watch out for banding of polarised skies, if saving as JPEG.

 

[Nod]

Top quality 1st generation JPEGs are very little different from TIFFs as far as quality goes. Knock the compression ratio up a bit and quality starts to suffer and go through a couple of open/save cycles if you want those JPEG artefacts to feature.