Digital BW, The Print

On May 19, 2004, at 4:22 PM, John Vitollo wrote:

>
>> Tim, it is not necessary to convert a tif to psd for 
>> editing...although psd is
>> preferable when you want to save your adjustment layers for later 
>> review.
>
> With the latest Photoshop, adjustment layers are saved in both 
> formats. I think this started
> with Photoshop 7.

Yes, layered TIFF support began in PS 7 - just be careful with this, as 
most apps cannot read layered TIFF properly (though if you embed a 
fullsize preview it will at least place fine). I use layered TIFF (with 
ZIP compression) for archiving all of my large, layered files - sizes 
are fraction of that for PSD for the same document.

Also, yes, both TIFF and PSD are typically lossless-encoded (TIFF does 
support JPEG compression, but that's rarely used), so there's no loss 
of detail going between the formats. However, there may be features 
(such as layers) which are not supported identically between the 
formats or by other applications.

Within Photoshop however, you can go back and forth between a layered 
TIFF and layered PSD as many times as you want with no loss of 
information; and likewise, you can go between a flattened TIFF and 
flattened PSD with no loss.

-R