Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: larkis on August 13, 2019, 11:08:20 am

Title: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: larkis on August 13, 2019, 11:08:20 am
I have a few thousand master images that have all the adjustments done with lightroom that I want to back up to a DLT drive. What have people been doing here ? Export to a 16 bit tiff ? With sharpening or without ? If I want to print the master image at various sizes down the road, i assume i would do print sharpening then.

Anything else I should keep in mind ?
Title: Re: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: john beardsworth on August 13, 2019, 12:33:16 pm
Why do anything at all? Other than backup the masters and the catalogue, that is. There's no need to export those TIFs.

By the way, there is a Lightroom forum here.
Title: Re: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: larkis on August 13, 2019, 03:05:23 pm
Tiff's are not relying on lightroom or my library to exist or be readable in 20 years. At least that is my reasoning behind wanting to have a baked out version of all my masters. I do back up my raw's and catalog separately.
Title: Re: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: JaapD on August 14, 2019, 01:27:13 am
A 16 bit TIF would give you every opportunity in future to do whatever you want to do with your images, i.e. postprocessing, resizing for print, sharpening, etc. I wouldn’t do any sharpening on the 'masters' because that’s destructive, especially if you lateron find out that you applied too much of it.

Additionally to this, I also always keep my RAWs. Storage is cheap these days.

Regards,
Jaap
Title: Re: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: Terry_Kennedy on August 14, 2019, 03:51:15 pm
I have a few thousand master images that have all the adjustments done with lightroom that I want to back up to a DLT drive.

DLT is essentially dead. Quantum may have a few mechanisms they haven't been able to offload, but LTO won the tape format wars 12 years ago. The latest LTO generation is LTO 8 but media only just became available again after the two worldwide makers of LTO 8 media settled their cross-lawsuits. LTO generally reads 2 generations back and writes 1 generation back, but LTO 8 is an exception.

If you're pinching pennies, you can get older LTO generation drives on eBay inexpensively and then you test them with the freely-downloadable diagnostic (for IBM mechanisms, that is ITDT) to make sure they're not junk.

If you're value-conscious, you can buy a rebuilt / tested tape drive with a warranty from a place like Midwest Technical.

If you have a lot of money, you can buy a new drive from any of the vendors that sell them (IBM, Dell, Lenovo, HP, Quantum, etc.)

Note that anything newer than LTO4 will be SAS only, so you'll likely need a SAS host adapter for your computer.
Title: Re: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: kirkt on August 15, 2019, 09:52:04 am
You could also try to experiment with JPEG 2000 @16bit if you are trying to save space.

Kirk
Title: Re: Archiving developed "masters"
Post by: BobShaw on August 15, 2019, 06:42:29 pm
A 16 bit TIF would give you every opportunity in future to do whatever you want to do with your images, i.e. postprocessing, resizing for print, sharpening, etc. I wouldn’t do any sharpening on the 'masters' because that’s destructive, especially if you lateron find out that you applied too much of it.
Additionally to this, I also always keep my RAWs. Storage is cheap these days.
That is my approach.
I export on TIF 16 bit Prophoto and all printing is done from this using a print programme.
All of my data is on a single Drobo. The computer just has an alias to documents, images etc.
I backup up everything using Time Machine including OS, Users, Apps, Data every hour.