Lightroom: Export Settings for TIFF
category: Lightroom • 2 min read
Lightroom allows you to export your photos in:
- JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group
- PSD: Photoshop document
- TIFF: Either “Tagged Image File Format” or “Tag Image File Format” depending on when. Now it’s only TIFF.
- DNG: Digital negative
- Original
Exporting photos as TIFF file is mostly done for sending photos to the customers or to stock libraries. The exported PSD photos are the photos after all the edits done in Lightroom.
Lightroom: Export Tiff
First you select your photo or photos, then in Library module, you select the Export button and you will get:
- Select the TIFF format.
- You have the choice of compressing the TIFF file or not. The ZIP compression is lossless, meaning that contrarily to JPEG where the more you compress, the lower the quality. The ZIP compression is much more effective on large areas of single color.
- The Color Space can be either sRGB, AdobeRGB, or ProPhoto RGB. If you want to save space then use the sRGB, the lowest “color gamut”, while ProPhoto RGB has the highest “color gamut”.
- The Bit Depth can either be 8bit or 16bit. And now we can start the various religious wars. Should you use 8bit per channel or 16bit per channel? All screens only use 8bit output, whether you set it to 8bit or 16bit. Almost all printers use 8bit output, whether you set it to 8bit or 16bit. There are very few printers that have 16bit drivers, such as the Epson x900 series printers or some Canon IPx100 series printers. The 16bit PSD file will be significantly larger that the 8bit PS.
- Where to export the photo? The original folder or any other specific folder. If the file exist, what will Lightroom do? Ask you, overwrite, or rename the new file.
- Any naming scheme? The original file, whatever you want… I usually use the same naming system that I use to import the files.
- Image sizing: Allows you to set the final dimension of the TIFF file. What I don’t understand is why? You already control the crop with Lightroom, and anybody that wants TIFF files will have Photoshop, where they can do anything, crop, enlarge…
- Metadata: Do you want to remove your metadata, and only keep your copyrights and keywords? My only question is why add your Copyright Watermark? Anybody that wants TIFF files will have Photoshop, where they can do anything, crop, enlarge… Usually, I will keep the keywords when I export the TIFF photos.