Software for Converting Jpegs into Tiff Files (Batch Conversions)

[R_Fredrick_Smith]

[ QUOTE ]
hi, i am looking at storing the older photos that i shot in jpeg format and was told to convert it to tiff to maintain the quality. know that i have a few more compact flash cards i can shoot in raw.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well you were told wrong. The JPG at this point has all the data it is ever going to have. Converting it to TIF does not regain any data, it merely saved the data you now have in a different format. The one thing you can do with the TIF is edit it in the future and not lose any more data. But as I mentioned before, the arbitrary conversion of all your JPGs to TIF will just mean you'll need a lot more space. Shooting in RAW gives you the maximum data there is to be had from a shot. When you convert the RAW file to Photoshop and edit it, then you might want to save as TIF to preserve the maximum data. But you can also save in PSD format and have even more capability.

Cheers,
rfs

[R_Fredrick_Smith]

I'm puzzled by your remarks. If you load a JPG into Photoshop there is no need to convert it to TIF, you just load it in and do whatever you want. At that point you might save it out to TIF or PSD, etc, depending on what you want to do in the future. But what benefit does one get by simply converting a whole folder of JPGs into TIFs? If you're just going to load the TIF into PS later to edit, then you gained nothing. Also your statement about saving to TIF being the only reliable way to save files to preserve your work, that is just not true. You can save them as PSD and that format has even more capability to save all your work than TIF does. Naturally you usually don't want to save a JPG back out as JPG since you do lose something each time you resave.
If you shoot RAW, then the cleanest workflow is to open the image in Photoshop directly, then make any changes, and then save to PSD or TIF. Again PSD will give you some advantages over TIF. But you might also need to save out a JPG if you are going to post to web. But by and large, no matter how you shoot, RAW or JPG, there is no advantage to converting either to a bunch of TIF files. The only time an image needs to be saved out in TIF or PSD is if you have made changes to it.

Cheers,
rfs


Cheers,
rfs

[David Bunch]

I guess I wasn't specific enough. I figured the reason he needed all tifs was to facilitate editing of all the files, as in running an action on an entire batch. Obviously one wouldn't need to convert first for smaller numbers, just Save As a tif at some point. As for PSD, that's great, I save my layered work as PSD, but most labs won't accept them for printing, only tif or jpg and sometimes bmp.

David