Saving/archive advice

WJ
Posted By
William_Jay
Aug 18, 2007
Views
373
Replies
9
Status
Closed
I have read on here that saving a file with layers is the best way in case you ever want to edit anything again, but which way is reccomended tiff option.. saving lzw or zip for smaller files, and are these methods truly "lossless"?

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DM
dave_milbut
Aug 18, 2007
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZW>

and zip is lossless as well. take your pick.
C
chrisjbirchall
Aug 18, 2007
Try zipping a 16 bit TIFF and you’ll most likely end up with a larger file, not smaller 🙁

But look on the bright side: HD space is so cheap these days, why even worry about compressing your precious image files?
WJ
William_Jay
Aug 18, 2007
Chris, it isnt so much the hard drive space as well as the archiving on DVD/cd space, even with my double layer DVD drive maxing out at 8gb, most of my images after editing are ending up (non compressed) around 300-400mb so thats only 25 or so images per DVD, only 1 or 2 if I use a standard CD at 800mb.
B
Bernie
Aug 18, 2007
most of my images after editing are ending up (non compressed) around 300-400mb so thats only 25 or so images per DVD

At 1$ per DVD, that’s 4 cents per image.cheap storage if you ask me.
WJ
William_Jay
Aug 18, 2007
Its not a cost issue at all, more of "its a pain to have only a few images on one disk" issue.
DR
Donald_Reese
Aug 18, 2007
I flatten all my layers when finished for archiving and then i save the dng file right next to the worked version for future reworking if needed. maybe not the best way,but i am comfortable doing it that way.
RK
Rob_Keijzer
Aug 18, 2007
What I do is save all my non-rejected camera files to CD’s (if a CD dies I lose 700 MB, If a DVD dies I lose 4.7 GB)

I mirror the CD’s (second copy) to another address (my girlfriend’s). That keeps the images if my office catches fire. (offices sometimes do that)

After having worked on the selects I save them to external HDD storage (production files), and keep them there until the client selection/chewing over/final decision is done.

Well after that I save the flattened versions to another mirrored CD set, and that’s it!

I’m never afraid that I might have to do the edits again in a different way, but if that does happen in the future, I’m bound to have my skill improved and I’ll probably have better software.

Rob
BD
Brett Dalton
Aug 20, 2007
Alternativly External hdd’s are very cheep these days. That would be a good option for backups.

PSD’s getting that big is an issue, it could be an option to save the origional DNG, and a LOW rez version of the PSD which will at least give you the origional to work from and a file which shows you how you did the origional.

BRETT
GK
Graeme_Kaufman
Aug 20, 2007
I agree with Rob – I reckon that if I ever needed to re-edit a file, I’d do it differently anyway.

So unless I have a particularly complex PS edit, I would normally save a flattened version (I do retain the original RAW files though, so I can start again with an undegraded image).

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