Tiff & Raw on camera

[R&J]

I have a Olympus e500 and would like to understand more about the functions of digital slr photography,
the manual really is no help. Can any of you learned people please explain what TIFF & RAW files are and how I can benefit from using them. They also use massive amounts of card space allowing only about 40 on a 1GB card.
Also whilst on the subject of memory cards, there is an option to use both XD and CF is there and advantage for using one type over the other.

thanks

[robbieduncan]

Read this www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/u-raw-files.shtml

And then read the other articles on that site! Basically RAW is like a digital negative, JPEG is like a print from that negative. By shooting in RAW you are leaving yourself more options in post-processing. RAW also captures more data...

[robdickinson]

Tiff I think uses lossles compression, doesnt throw data away, JPG does, RAW is just that, the data as it comes off the sensor.

RAW is by far the best format to capture, allowinf more manipulation later on, JPG is ok for snaps, realy depends how & what your shooting , few shots - macro say then raw, many - sport or something, jpg. (It also takes longer to write raw to the memory card.


CF cards tend to be cheaper per megabyte and faster than all other memory cards.

[graham@reading]

RAW should allow for 95 or so per 1gig.

Never really understood why a TIFF is bigger than a RAW seeing as there can't eb any more infomation than the latter provides.

[Nacnud]

graham@reading said:

Never really understood why a TIFF is bigger than a RAW seeing as there can't eb any more infomation than the latter provides.

RAW uses lossless compression, presumably they are packed better than TIFF.

My EOS 20D creates raw file sizes between 6Mb and 10Mb.
These are roughly double the size of a best quality JPEG of the same subject.

I believe different manufacturers use different compression techniques in their RAW files, hence there are different file extensions and reader incompatibilities. I know that Canon and Nikon both create fairly small RAW files compared to some others - a friend was complaining about not being able to take many pictures in RAW and we compared file sizes, the shock was that their RAW files were 2 to 3 times the size of mine. Can't remember the make of their camera, sorry.

[fergusd]

It's been suggested that not all compressed RAW files use lossless compression . . . Nikon, on some cameras, I believe use compressed RAW files that are not completely lossless . . .

Still, TIFF is usually much bigger than RAW as it's a very old format . . .

Fd