What is the best format for photo editing and storage?
I want to edit photos and store them with the emphasis on quality as opposed to space saving.
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Moe
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What Is the Best Format for Photo Editing and Storage?
Comments: 4 Responses to “What Is the Best Format for Photo Editing and Storage?”
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The best is to store it in the original format that was saved from the camera. You usually don't need to think about this, because when you import photos into the Photos app, it saves them in that format, with no conversion. Any conversion to another format will reduce the quality in some way, or needlessly increase the size with no increase in quality.
The answer can vary depending on what you intend to do with the photos after importing. If you are not doing any post production editing the original format will usually suffice. If post production is a priority, then conversion to a lossless format like DNG, albeit with much larger files, would be a reasonable option.
The Library of Congress recommends 16 bit tiff
Tom: Where do you see that? When I checked https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/stillimg.html it shows TIFF, JPEG, PNG or JPEG2000 as "preferred" and other formats as "acceptable." Of course that's for the Library of Congress. It doesn't mean you have to use their recommendations.