Public Forums > Photography > Photo Sizes

When you have pictures taken by a photographer, you need to check the size of the image.  Many photographers, if they are doing a big job will take the image at the highest possible resolution.  This is not the case if they are shooting a random shoot - say if they are doing a cheap shoot or doing a basic portfolio collection for you they may use a jpeg format which is easier to handle, but not so great for you if you want to blow it up later or edit it as its a format that can lose quality.  If you can, try to request the files in TIFF or RAW format - there's images are large and it means that you can blow the image up later on without losing any quality!

Quick question: are TIFF images completely different from raw images and are raw images always huge in size? I think I know the answer but I would rather ask a pro photographer for clarification. I hardly ever deal with TIFFs but when I have, I've noticed they are much better in quality. Is requesting TIFFs easy for photographers to fulfill? Like, are there any special steps they need to take to convert the files to a TIFF or is it relatively simple? Sometimes photographers don't want to do little things that will take extra time or work for them so I just wanted a better idea of what providing TIFFs involved. I think you gave great advice and would like to make a note to ask for TIFFs when I do future shoots.

Thanks!

Hey Dania

Getting images in TIFF is a great idea.  TIFF is different in raw in that TIFF can be viewed in all kinds of computers (so any Windows PC has the ability to view a TIFF file) but this is not the case with a RAW file - RAWS are specific to the camera they are taking with so if you take a Canon RAW image and then view it on a PC that doesn't have the right Canon software you will not be able to see it.

TIFFS are just as pure as RAW's though when it comes to image size and quality (jpegs are always compressed).  Photographers may try to put you off because TIFF files are huge so take take to provess nad burn onto cd for you and take them longer to deal with than jpegs.  They also take up more memory space.  It's not a HUGE deal, but you would need to check that the photographer is shooting in RAW or TIFF to begin with.  Converting a jpeg to TIFF is pointless because the image was compressed at the size of shooting.  However, converting RAW to TIFF or shooting in TIFF means all the orginal quality was kept so you need to know if the photographer is using these formats to start with.  If so, just say you are happy to take a DVD with all the TIFFS and you will sort them out yourself at home.  It's an extra 15-20 mins for a competent photographer!

Hope that helps!

Oh, wow, that's exactly what I wanted to know! Thanks so much, Rowena! I'll definitely write down this information and be sure to put it into practice for my future shoots! I've always wondered about that whole topic...and I have noticed that Raw files usually have the name of the camera on it that I guess took the picture. I always wondered what that was all about or if it had any significance. And I got my answer! Thanks again!

Hey you are welcome!