EXPORT - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 264

Don't use . PSD
From this point forward, I recommend that you don't use psd i les for any of your
Photoshop work. Use tif in stead. It provides all the same saving capabilities as
psd (layers, type, alpha channels, etc.), with a distinct advantage: tif o f ers much
more long-term, archival viability than psd.

5

h e tif f ormat is an open source, industry standard. psd is proprietary, and in
my opinion, outdated, with a number of programmatic disadvantages to tif . It's
highly likely that more sot ware, many years in the future, will be able to read
tif i les than will read psd. You might currently have many i les in your image
archives in the psd format. Consider the benei ts of re-saving all of them as tif .

tiff (.tif): T agged Image File format. tif ca n be used for virtually any purpose
except posting to the Web. When exporting tifs y ou can also specify bit depth
and apply compression. In all cases, compression on tif i les is lossless —no data
is discarded during compression. Exporting as .tif allows you to set bit depth and
color space, (see below) and whether or not to include video i les in the export.

Use 16-bit for the highest quality
When exporting tif i les I recommend you usually use 16-bit depth, especially if
you're going to continue processing the image(s) in other sot ware. One exception
might be if you're sending exported tifs t o a service bureau for printing, in which
case 8-bit is usually adequate. (Ask your vendor for details on how they want
i les prepared.) Depending on your circumstances, 16-bit might not be worth the
additional i le size.

dng: Dig ital Negative. Use to re-encode raw captures. I always work with my raw
captures in dng f ormat and I don't save the original raw i les from the camera at er
they've been converted. However, I do the dng co nversion on import, or at least,
using the menu command in Library. I recommend using the default settings for
dng co nversions in Lightroom. dng is al so discussed in Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Original: You can export derivative i les in the same format as the original. In a
batch with multiple i le types selected, each derivative will be saved in the same
format as its own original. If virtual copies are being exported, the resulting i les
will be in the same formats as the originals from which they were made; this can
be a good way to generate “real” i les from vcs. You can't change any i le settings
when exporting to Original format.

Video i les: If you have video i les selected for export, Lightroom will include
them in the export, but the only processing Lightroom will do on the exported
video i les is renaming. All other export settings will be ignored for video i les.