ZIP compressed TIFF vs PSB?

[Eric Brody]

I use a Sony A7RIV and make a decent number of layers in Photoshop. Since Sony has not seen fit to make a lossless compressed format, I've been ending up with reasonably large files, large enough to trigger the dreaded >4GB TIFF warning when saving.

To get around that, I've been using ZIP compression and it seems to work reasonably well albeit slowly. Today I tried saving the same file as a ZIP compressed TIFF and as a PSB (now that Lightroom will "see" PSB's). The PSB file was actually a bit smaller than the Zip compressed TIFF.

Can someone more expert comment on these file saving strategies? Which is "better?"

Thanks for any comments.

[Guillermo Luijk]

I convert my Sony A7 II uncompressed ARW files into DNG usually saving more than half the space. DNG RAW data generated by Adobe's DNG Converter is intact, it even doesn't clip black/white RAW levels so you can optimise them at will since all the metadata can be easily inspected or changed using exiftool.

e.g.:
_DSC3847.ARW: 48.1MB
_DSC3847.dng: 20.1MB

Regards

[digitaldog]

http://digitaldog.net/files/TIFFvsPSD.pdf

[Martin Kristiansen]

I use a Sony A7RIV and make a decent number of layers in Photoshop. Since Sony has not seen fit to make a lossless compressed format, I've been ending up with reasonably large files, large enough to trigger the dreaded >4GB TIFF warning when saving.

To get around that, I've been using ZIP compression and it seems to work reasonably well albeit slowly. Today I tried saving the same file as a ZIP compressed TIFF and as a PSB (now that Lightroom will "see" PSB's). The PSB file was actually a bit smaller than the Zip compressed TIFF.

Can someone more expert comment on these file saving strategies? Which is "better?"

Thanks for any comments.

Don't understand what use a Sony lossless compressed format would be when editing an image in PS since that lossless compressed file will only save space on the camera card and on the computer hard drive as a raw file. The moment you open it in PS you are in a different place and whatever compression the raw file had is not relevant.

[mcbroomf]

http://digitaldog.net/files/TIFFvsPSD.pdf

Good read ... thanks

[nemophoto]

To Andrew's excellent article, I add that a lot depends on your final use of your file. Much of what I shoot goes into print. If I mask a layered PSD/PSB file (to silo an image for example), TIFFs render the image background as white. A PSD maintains that transparent background in a page layout program such as InDesign. To keep that transparent background in a TIFF, you need a clipping path and need it to be active. This is less than ideal if you are masking hair versus a solid object.