Tiffs reduce size in lightroom

[isp]

Lightroom Version Number

12,4

Operating System

1. macOS 12 Monterey

Hello i have some photos , make the basic adjustments then i inport some of them in photoshop for retouch. The files i am working in photoshop are tiff . At the end i realized that the file size og the tiff is 3 times bigger than the raw file... is there any way to reduce the the tiffs file sizes ?

 

[clee01l]

The RAW file is probably compressed (hopefully losslessly) The photo site values in the RAW are converted to Individual RGB values as they are decompressed. The RAW file is shoe with 12 bit color and RGB RGB values are 16 bit color.
The TIFF files are created and saves from the demozaic’d RGB files. The resulting Foley’s is going to always be larger than the Compressed RAW file. The TIFF file can be 16 or 32 bit color and compared or uncompressed. You may have created layers in the Photoshop process. Lach layer will duplicate the number of pixels in the base layer.

Now this explains the differences in size between the RAW original and the TIFF file. Why would you want to reduce the size of the TIFF? Disk storage is relatively cheap today


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[isp]

the reason is that the tiff files are triple the size of the raw file ... is there any way to reduce the size or convert the tiff file ?

 

[Hal P Anderson]

The raw file is at most 16 bits per pixel. The TIFF uses three 16- or 32-bit numbers per pixel. There is your factor of three. If you want to save a tonne of space, you can use JPEG instead of TIFF, but nobody here is going to recommend that. Disk space is relatively cheap these days. The rational thing is to not let it bother you.

 

[Paul McFarlane]

is there any way to reduce the size or convert the tiff file ?

If you have layers in your TIFF file, flattening them will reduce the size (but not back to the RAW file size)

 

[Conrad Chavez]

The one thing you can do to make a TIFF smaller from Lightroom Classic is to apply compression. Lightroom Classic offers a ZIP compression option for TIFF. But to retain the quality and flexibility of the original, even compressed TIFF cannot be as small as JPEG or raw format. (The only other ways to reduce TIFF size are to reduce bit depth and reduce pixel dimensions.)

It’s common to think of the original photo file (raw or JPEG) as the reference for how big a photo file should be. But in fact, TIFF is closer to the natural size of an image, and raw and JPEG are actually the unusual file sizes. Camera raw is not a universally supported format for editing, printing, website posting, etc. Only a very small number of applications such as Lightroom Classic can work with raw without first converting them expanded to a full RGB file. To be more widely compatible with common applications and services, an image must be converted to TIFF or Photoshop format (full quality, large file) or JPEG (compromised quality, very small file).

Here's an example. Somebody brings home a box containing a flat-packed wardrobe so they can store clothes in it, and they assemble that furniture. Assembled and ready for use, it now takes up maybe 10 times the 3D space of the box it came in. You could say, now wait a minute, the size of that furniture bloated up 10x, this is wrong, what’s the deal? But we don’t look at it that way. We understand that for the wardrobe to actually do what it’s supposed to do and store clothes, it has to be expanded to its natural size. We could ask for the wardrobe to be recompressed down to its “original” compact size that fits in the flat box it came in, but that compact size would make it completely unable to store clothes, and therefore unusable as furniture. To be usable, that furniture must be fully expanded.

The same is true of images. If you want a raw image to be usable in most image applications, or display it on a website, it cannot remain raw. It has to be converted to an expanded channel format, such as TIFF or Photoshop format. But files in those formats cannot be as small as the original raw. Now, another widely compatible RGB channel format is JPEG, which can be as small as a raw (or smaller) and is needed to display on a website; but there is no free lunch there either, because to get the file size down that small, JPEG throws out a lot of the image’s original editing flexibility .