Wendell, hi! I think it’s a good practice to save your jpg’s as tiff’s or psd’s as early as possible in the editing process so you don’t accidentally overwrite your original – which you’ll want to archive in their unedited form. But it really doesn’t matter where along the path you laid out that you save them – so long as you avoid saving as a jpg!
Chuck
Wendall,
I think the best thing is for you to determine a workflow that you can be comfortable using. The JPEG file that you download from your camera contains pixels, obviously. And once you have loaded that image into Photoshop Elements, you are not editing the JPEG, you are editing the pixels that were contained in the JPEG. The issue comes up when it is time to save your modified image. If you save it back to the same JPEG file, you lose your original image. And additionally saving an image again as a JPEG is going to cause you to lose some of your image because of JPEG compression. So, you should decide if you want to save a copy of your original image as a TIFF or a PSD first and then only work on that image or whether you want to use the "Save As" option after you have worked on your image. TIFF & PSD images are "lossless" file formats. Once you have saved an image in either of these formats you can continue working and saving your work without fear of degrading your image.
Different people have different workflows, but the most important thing to remember is not to save any of the edits in the JPEG format before doing the conversion. I happen to convert first, because I usually do a batch conversion of all of the JPEGs to PSD, with the PSDs (or TIFFs) going into one folder and the JPEGs in another one to be moved to either my external HD or CD. It’s just easier for me to get all of the "thinking" out of the way first!
Beth, I keep forgetting that you can batch convert JPEG’s like that! Most of what I work with are RAW that have been converted directly to TIFF, but occasionally when I don’t want the conversion hassle I shoot in large size, low compression JPEG. Your method certainly will keep you out of trouble – and anything I can do to avoid thinking is good….!
🙂
Beth,
I have the feeling that my perception on this issue has irritated you somewhat, and that certainly was not my intention. The main thing I want to try to get across is that we do not edit the JPEG, or the TIFF, or the PSD. These are file formats that store pixels. Once we have loaded those pixels we are not editing the file. We are editing the pixels that were contained in the file. So if we have a workflow that we are comfortable with that helps us SAVE our work properly, then that workflow should reassure us that we will have what we want in the end.
Jim
Truthfully, Jim, I didn’t happen to notice your post or Chuck’s, so I apologize for even responding on this thread.
Thanks to all for prompt and informative replies. I think I’m clear on the subject now. Wendell
