png or tiff

[Matthew Crews]

TIFF is basically a bitmap format (1 pixel = 1 byte per color value, so 1 pixel = 3 bytes for a 24-bit image). TIFF does have a compression option,

PNG is a lossless compression, not unlike a ZIP archive, but with an efficient compression algorithm. Though not a perfect analogy, 1 pixel <= 3 bytes. PNG also supports an alpha layer (transparency), which isn't important unless you want it to be.

For example, I just took a screenshot of my desktop. Screen resolution is 1920x1080 @ 32-bit, so 8,294,400 bytes of pixel information are required (1920x1080 pixels * 4 bytes per pixel (RGB values + alpha value)) . The corresponding PNG came out to 1,969,094 bytes, whereas an equivalent TIFF with built-in compression is 2,371,201 bytes. An uncompressed TIF is 8,294,843 bytes, slightly larger than the raw pixel information.

There may be use cases where TIF is a better option, but for the lay person, PNG is better.

Cheers,

-Matt



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>-------- Original Message --------
>Subject: png or tiff
>Local Time: November 12, 2017 6:28 AM
>UTC Time: November 12, 2017 1:28 PM
>From: bmike1 at gmail.com
>To: PLUG <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>
>
>it was recommended to me to save lossless pictures as PNG. why not TIFF?
>
>-- 
>:-)~MIKE~(-:
>