Topic Moved: Jpg vs. Tif colors

[Gerry]

I am moving this topic since I haven't received any responses in other thread:

I am having prints made and I don't understand why there is such a difference in hue between jpg and tiff images. The hues are much more vibrant and the color of the seawater is much more cyanish than in the jpgs. The printer doesn't know why this is and says they SHOULD be the same. I would never have them printed in jpg because of the lackluster color although most of the printers seem to want to print from jpg. They are both RGB and the only difference seems to be 8 vs. 16 bit. Thx.

[KentDub]

JPG compresses images in a lossy format. It compresses the chrominance (color) data more than the luminance (b/w or brightness) of the images. This falls in line with how the human eye sees (we're really not that sensitive to color). When JPG compresses the chrominance, it becomes averaged, blocky and bleeds. The TIFF format is a lossless format - meaning it is pixel-for-pixel identical to the origional; Color data exists for every pixel in the image and is not sharing color information with other pixels. TIFF is a much better format for printing - JPG is a much better format for transmitting images online. The printer shouldn't care about the source format since it is sent pixel data in a printers version of RAW data.

Make sure both your JPG and TIFF have the same color space applied to them. I recommend sticking to TIFF for printing, or simply print stright from Photoshop. If you are talking about an online print shop you may be SOL unless you find another shop that accepts TIFFs. If they won't take TIFF but will take PDF you can embed the image, profile and all, in a lossless format inside of a PDF.

The 8-bit vs 16-bit will have no difference unless your printer has a special 16-bit driver (As some of the Canon printers have). If you're using a standard printer driver then the 16-bit image will be converted to 8-bit on-the-fly as it is sent to the printer. The difference is subtle, yet significant - but is likely not a factor in the situation you are in.

[Gerry]

Thx. for that, Kent. Very helpful. I was not checking box Convert Profile to sRGB when converting file to jpg. Thx., again.

[Colin Southern]

I am moving this topic since I haven't received any responses in other thread:

I am having prints made and I don't understand why there is such a difference in hue between jpg and tiff images. The hues are much more vibrant and the color of the seawater is much more cyanish than in the jpgs. The printer doesn't know why this is and says they SHOULD be the same. I would never have them printed in jpg because of the lackluster color although most of the printers seem to want to print from jpg. They are both RGB and the only difference seems to be 8 vs. 16 bit. Thx.

With JPEG you can specify the output quality (-v- Image size); so long at the quality setting is set close to the max then you shouldn't be able to detect ANY loss of quality when compared to a TIFF.

As per Kent's suggestion, I too would check the colourspace; if the file is inadvertantly set to the likes of ProPhoto then you'll definately see a big change if the printer is assuming sRGB (as most do).

If you post one of the JPEGs here with Exif data in tact we should be able to tell you some more.

Sorry if I missed this when posted somewhere else; I didn't know it was there (either that or I'd forgotten about it).

[mrsoto]

Make sure both your JPG and TIFF have the same color space applied to them. I recommend sticking to TIFF for printing, or simply print stright from Photoshop. If you are talking about an online print shop you may be SOL unless you find another shop that accepts TIFFs. If they won't take TIFF but will take PDF you can embed the image, profile and all, in a lossless format inside of a PDF.

This is possible that you jpg files are in sRGB and tiffs in adobeRGB.

sRGB is optimized to be used for screens which are RGB, (emitting colors [1])
adoveRGB is optimized to be translated to CYMK like printers, (reflecting colors)

[1] English isn't my natural language, hope this is correctly translated