PANOSONIC LUMIX DMC -FZ 7

[ESEA]

First of all, I am new here so Hi to all.
I am No pro, Just a hobbyist. I have been lost to photography since my old film Canon T70 camera lenses got damaged, the coatings have delaminated due to too many years living on yachts. I had a Olympus D600L (nothing to wright home about) and that's were I got lost as in lost interest after the novelty of digital wore off, but now I have got back into it. After loads of research  I got the PANOSONIC LUMIX DMC -FZ7  One of the main reasons for this was budget and this was the best bang for my buck.
Ok now lets get to the point: There is so much talk about RAW and how important it is. Unfortunately the FZ7 only has .tif and .jpg, .tiff been biggest file size at full resolution the files are somewhere around 17mb.
Now is this RAW? and if not does the .tiff have advantages above the .jpg as the images look identical but the .tif has the huge size. Is there procedures that I can do in Photoshop with .tif that I can not do with .jpg?

Thanks for any help on this
Regards
ESEA

[John Sheehy]

Tiff only avoids the lossy compression that the JPEGs from the camera use; they still have clipped highlights and poorly drawn blackpoint, and coarse quantization of highlights.  Byte for byte, they are extremely inefficient compared to RAW or JPEG.

[ESEA]

Tiff only avoids the lossy compression that the JPEGs from the camera use; they still have clipped highlights and poorly drawn blackpoint, and coarse quantization of highlights.  Byte for byte, they are extremely inefficient compared to RAW or JPEG.
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Thanks John
So the difference is just file size as the images are identical, so it seems. As for the lossy comprestion if I keep the original do I loose anything? Is it only when I edit then save do I have the lossy compression syndrome?
Thanks

[John Sheehy]

Thanks John
So the difference is just file size as the images are identical, so it seems. As for the lossy comprestion if I keep the original do I loose anything? Is it only when I edit then save do I have the lossy compression syndrome?
Thanks
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No, you get compression artifacts automatically with JPEGs.  The degree depends on the amount of compression used.

The TIFFs are better, but they are ridiculously huge, and nowhere near RAW in terms of captured information.  Both TIFF and JPEG clip away highlights that would be safe in a RAW file.  The deep shadows are also rendered for display purposes only, and don't have the full shadow detail, either, of RAW.

[ESEA]

Thanks John
So with my camera I  have to live with the JPEG's at the lowest compression (highest quality), as having +/- 17MB is insane as far as storage is concerned. With the JPEG's I am still going to have to upgrade HD storage
storage