Tidbit Tuesday

Hi, Kate here to bring you a tidbit that will knock your socks off! (where did that silly expression come from anyway?) I don't know about you, but I have LOTS of digital scrapbooking layouts saved in various locations. I have a hard time getting rid of anything, either, so I will probably keep those layered files long after I print my layouts. Hard drives are getting bigger and less expensive, but why use more space than necessary? That's why I want to talk about TIFF. Like PSD (the native file format for Adobe Photoshop and PSE), TIFFs are layered files that can save all the information that a PSD file can. I'll admit that I didn't understand what all the fuss was, most popular graphics programs can open PSD files and my files were always much bigger when I saved them as TIFF's. Once I figured out the optimal settings, though, I understood the fuss and am now a huge fan of TIFF files. Use the following settings when saving your Photoshop files as TIFFs:

LZW is a 'lossless' image compression, which means that unlike the compression that JPEG files use, you don't lose any information when saving in LZW format. I'll admit that I don't understand pixel order, but Photoshop defaulted to Interleaved so that's what I use. I'm using a PC, so I use the PC byte order. Finally, I choose ZIP layer compression. I just opened a 258 MB layout file that I had saved as a PSD file and re-saved it as a TIFF. The new file size is 134 MB. That's almost half the size of the PSD file!

One thing about saving as a TIFF file is it does take longer to save the file and open it again, so I'm still using PSD format for my working layouts, but when I'm done and want to save the final layerd file, I save as a TIFF and discard the PSD.

I'll admit that when I first heard about people saving layouts as TIFF files I was skeptical. I've done a fair amount of research, though, and I feel comfortable with my decision. Especially since Adobe now owns and supports the TIFF file format.

Well, maybe I should have called today's post "Techie Tuesday." I know it was a bit technical, but I hope you're as excited as I am about all the space you can free up on your hard drive by saving as TIFF instead of PSD. Just think, with the money you'll save on hard drives, you can go shopping for more scrap goodies... and you'll have the space to store them!