Myths About Slide Scanning and Negative Scanning: TIFF Files Are A Requirement

Photographers and photography enthusiasts believe that you are losing out if you don't work with exclusively with a lossless digital image format. This is wrong much of the time.

If you are doing extensive editing of your images that may require repeated opening, editing and resaving, you should work in a format that is lossless. However, most people don't need this, at least when working with images that Pixmonix returns after scanning your slides or negatives.

• High-quality original files. We scan to JPEG files to provide an easier file format for your computer to handle. The full-resolution JPEG images that we provide are compressed only a minimal amount. If you require TIFF files in addition or in place of the JPEG files, we can provide them as well. These TIFF files are provided as unedited versions of your digital scans.

• Minimal editing. Most people do not do any editing of the images that we provide after scanning. Many people never do more than crop an image for printing. This single recompression of the JPEG image is unlikely to cause noticeable damage to the image if the cropped JPEG is saved at high quality.

• Non-destructive Editing. Many people (and more every day) are working with non-destructive editing packages like Adobe Lightroom, Apple Apeture or Apple iPhoto. In these cases, repeted "edits" don't cause repeated recompression and resaving of the lossy JPEG format.

Additionally, TIFF files have some downsides:

• File Size. The files are significantly larger than a very high quality JPEG for most images. For example, a 2000 PPI scan of 35mm film results in a TIFF file that is approximately 16MB in size. For most images, the resulting high-quality, full-sized JPEG files are 4-8MB. For 4000 PPI scans, TIFF files are approximately 60MB; full-sized JPEG files are 10-15MB. These smaller files are much easier to use. They take less disk space for stoarge (and backup) and open much more quickly in any program making use of the images.

• Software and service provider compatibility. Some programs and some service providers (e.g., photo sharing services and photo printing services) will not work with TIFF files.