Wednesday, June 18, 2008

TIFF vs. PSD

A few years ago it was a much clearer difference between the file formats tiff and psd.

Tiff (Tagged Image File Format) was a widely accepted standard but limited in implemented features. As it is tagged, it could of course be extended, but hardly any applications supported for example layers in tiff files.

Psd was a proprietary format for Adobe Photoshop, and it supported all Photoshop's features.

Today both tiff and psd are owned by Adobe, and they support the same feature set. Tiff may still be more of a generic standard, but it allows such a lot of specific tags and additions, that you rarely can be sure that your program can read a tiff file from an unknown source. However, you can happily use Photoshop without ever opening one single psd file.

An 8-bit version of an image is often slightly bigger in tiff than psd, but the difference is not that big.

The 16-bit versions are about the same size.

Both psd and tiff file formats are lossless.

The only real reason to choose one over the other is what other applications you will use to read them. For example Preview in Mac OS X does not see transparency in tiff files, but it sees it in psd files. Nikon's Capture NX reads tiff files but it does not read psd files. And the gimp handles layers in psd files but not in tiff files.

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