In working with RAW images I find myself switching from one editor to another, saving intermediate files in TIFF (16-bit) in order to preserve the detail in intermediate files (my main reason for not doing all processing in Paintshop Pro is that application of adjustment curves seems to truncate the image data to eight bits per color plane and I wonder if there are other such compromises).
I wanted to see what memory savings might be possible by choosing a compressed TIFF image and so I saved a single TIF image multiple times, choosing the different options offered by Paintshop Pro X6. I was surprised to find that the greatest difference (roughly a factor of 2) came, not when choosing different compression schemes, but rather when I saved files in the CMYK color space instead of RGB. However, in reviewing the resulting images I noticed a change in the images when switching from CMYK tiff files to the RGB tiff files. The RGB appeared to me to be the better quality images.
What explains this? My own guess is that there is a bug in Paintshop Pro's conversion of RGB to CYMK. Perhaps there is another explanation someone could offer.
By the way, the file-size comparisons are revealing:
a. Original non-compressed TIFF file saved in RGB: 59.439 MB
b. File (a) saved as non-compressed TIFF in CYMK: 39.649 MB
c. File (b) saved as non-compressed TIFF inRGB: 29.988 MB
Results using either packed bits or LZF compression are similar. Appearance-wise the files (b) and (c) seem the same but both seem degraded as compared with (a).
TIFF Saves in CYMK
Moderator: Kathy_9