yes, i've googled...yes, i'm sure this has been debated before...but i'm going to ask it anyway because i'm ignorant and would like the opinion of those who know better than i

at my grandparents' house for a couple of more days, and i'm taking all of their pictures (a boatload, trust me) and scanning them for the sake of having digital copies of them all, in case of fire, etc...i'm scanning them at 1200ppi and saving them as TIFs...now, hard drive space isn't really a problem at this point as i had a 500gb external drive with me

however, my understanding of PNG is that it offers lossless compression with the same high quality color depth...the scanned images converted to PNG are consistently 50% the size of the uncompressed TIFs, so why wouldn't i want to convert them all to PNG?

although i've googled it, there seems to be a lot of people who are just disdainful of PNG without giving reasons, so i'm asking y'all for reasons to keep them in TIF...i'd rather store in them PNG, but only if i can preserve the quality

12/31/2006 11:04:37 AM

i'm not an expert but I believe it is just the difference in compression schemes. both are lossless.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG

Quote :

"Comparison with TIFF TIFF is a complicated format that incorporates an extremely wide range of options. While this makes it useful as a generic format for interchange between professional image editing applications, it makes supporting it in more general applications such as Web browsers difficult. It also means that many applications can read only a subset of TIFF types, creating more potential user confusion. The most common general-purpose, lossless compression algorithm used with TIFF is LZW, which is inferior to PNG and, until expiration in 2003, suffered from the same patent issues that GIF did. There is a TIFF variant that uses the same compression algorithm as PNG uses, but it is not supported by many proprietary programs. TIFF also offers special-purpose lossless compression algorithms like CCITT Group IV, which can compress bilevel images (e.g., faxes or black-and-white text) better than PNG's compression algorithm."

12/31/2006 11:13:20 AM

Quote :

"i'm wikipedia is not an expert but I it believes it is just the difference in compression schemes. both are lossless. "

12/31/2006 11:57:06 AM

Quote :

"it is just the difference in compression schemes formats. both are lossless."

TIFF is usually uncompressed; PNG uses lossless compression.

12/31/2006 12:01:14 PM

so...converting the TIFs to PNG is a good idea? i'm not losing anything?

12/31/2006 12:46:03 PM

as long as you are using 24bit png's, yep, way better.

12/31/2006 1:34:35 PM