Hi,
PR4 to affinity photo.
When I export from PR4 to edit in Affinity Photo 2 should I export from PR4 to a jpg or to a TIFF (or something else)?
I would assume a Tiff would be better from a quality perspective but Is there much difference, if any?
Thank you
Always sport to 16bit TIFF, which is superior to most cameras’ 12/14bit. JPG is only 8 bit
Wot @Joanna said, export to Affinity Photo as a 16 bit TIFF.
Thank you both.
I was also considering the dng format but I will use tiff.
Thanks again
I assume you are short on disk space, as otherwise the answer is obvious, as above. The problems you may see with jpegs are standard jpeg artifacts. Probably most important is posterization, harsh tone/color transitions, especially in the shadows. More experienced users may add to the list. If you find them, switch to 16-bit tiffs. To save disk space, you may also use free ImageMagick to (losslessly) compress your 16-bit tiffs in a way readable by AP2. PL8 tiff exports abide strictly to old specs, where LZW lossless compression could be applied to 8-bit rgb tiffs only, so PL 16-bit tiff exports are huge – 6*mpx. Personally, I don’t distract myself with such problems and always use 16-bit tiff exports in similar cases (“use approximation only as a last step” rule), even though only few photos would be affected by using jpegs. Just take care about the backups and stay happy without having to process video files 
It’s a bit like asking about the difference between jpeg exports at quality 75 and 100 – depends on input, goals and your measure of the difference. “Customer” may not see any difference except for the download time, and if that happens, perfectionism may have an unwanted side effect. Sometimes the only person to complain about the photo, is the author himself
Hi,
Disk space is not an issue, still some TBytes left on the NAS but I will just add another NAS to the system when it’s full. They are reasonably priced now.
I was really wondering where the quality loss was the greatest.
I was just wondering if PR4 was so good in it’s processing then maybe the difference in output quality was marginal between tiff, dng and jog.
But in the back of my mind was the fact that a tiff file was much bigger and probably had more colour depth so I just wanted to make sure that tiff was best and I wasn’t storing big file for no reason.
I don’t mind the file size.
I notice that a tiff file is 250mbytes and a dng is 150 Mbytes
But I don’t see much difference between dng and tiff, apart from file size.
But I suspect that the extra file size of the tiff must have more detail.
The jpg is obviously much smaller.
So I will still to tiff.