Processing Raw Photos

I have recently purchased Elements 7 and also downloaded successfully the RAW update 5.3. I am very new to RAW (Raw beginner!) and I have opened a few RAW photos and edited them in RAW, opened them in Elements and done any other necessary adjustments. I think it's working OK but some questions -
1) Once I am satisfied with the photo, what's the best way of saving, PSD, Tiff or JPEG? (A Tiff file I saved was 28MB and a PSD 50+MB whilst the JPEG about 4MB).
2) Do I lose the RAW file when I 'Save'? (Obviously I don't if I use 'Save As').
3) If I am perfectly satisfied with the saved file in JPEG format is there any need to keep the RAW (DNG) file?
4) Can I batch process RAW files? If so how? What basic settings should I use and again how should they be saved?
5) Is there a way to compress TIFF or PSD files without losing quality?
I've looked at Help files and have a book on Elements 7 but they don't seem to deal with the above questions.
Help please
Cheers
John

1. It depends what you are going to do with it, E.G. to post on here then save as 800 pixels on longest side @ 72 ppi
2. no
3. yes, see 1 above
4. Not in Elements but you can in Adobe Lightroom and Irfanview (which is free!)
5. I dont think so. JPG is a the compressing format.

Ken

I'm not going to answer everything since Ken has done it already.

3) the problem is that everything you do later on with jpeg degrades the quality, even moving.
5) you have an option to when saving in TIFF to use an image compression; zip, jpg and another one which i forgot.
The images are zipped but you can still open them without any problems.

I shoot in PEF since that's half the size then DNG that comes from the camera. I then compress them to DNG with the pc those files are even smaller then zip TIFF. I only keep those DNG since the stuff i do in photoshop is now so routine that it's done in 5seconds per photo so I simply redo most or save as TIFF if i need a print.

You can batch process Raw files in Elements.
Open all the files you want to process by ctrl clicking them, then in Adobe Raw click on apply to all at the top of the left hand side where all the photos are. Anything you do to the first photo will be applied to the others.

You don't lose the raw file but you do lose the unprocessed raw file. Save all your raw files somewhere else before you process them.

I recommend the Missing Manual as an excellent guide, and if you can stand their style have a look also at Scott Kelby & Matt Kloskowski's book, which gives some great work arounds and tips..

I've always found PSDs to be smaller than Tiffs (just tried it, and the tiff was 22.3Mb, the PSD 19.2Mb). Certainly if you start using layers, the PSD will be smaller.

Opening and resaving a jpeg will degrade it. Simply moving it will not.

Dan

Dan you're right

Is TIFF also larger if you use image compression compared to PSD?

I would think not - but I'll just go and check.

Right, the 23.2Mb uncompressed Tiff became:

5.26Mb with LZW compression
4.28Mb with ZIP compression
2.79Mb with JPG compression (at quality level 12)

Might be lower than normal as it was a B+W image, but you get the idea. The jpeg compression (at highest quality setting) would be practically indistinguishable from the original, but I would guess the more you saved and resaved, the more the image would degrade.

LZW is apparently lossless, and I believe ZIP is too. They could cause problems though if your image editor can't open these formats though (if for instance you sent them to a friend/client). Much better, I would think, to save a jpeg in the first place and keep your Raw file.

Dan

FWIW, LZW and ZIP are both definitely lossless
(It'll depend on the image content as to which will give a smaller file size.)

Thank you all for your help. As a complete beginner using RAW I think I am starting to get an understanding of what to do with my RAW files.

I think for the immediate future I'll use PEF, edit and save as JPEG and keep the original RAW files.

I do not have a compression program - can anyone recommend a good (free) one please?

Thanks again for all the help

John

you can get the DNG converter from adobe for free, it will pick up the PEF files from the card and convert and compress them to DNG. the bonus of this are that DNG is better supported by most programs and the file is smaller.
in photoshop CS2, 3 and 4 I had the same option with DNG as I had with PSD. I could easely make HDR photos without converting them for example.
I think that photoshop elements offer the same support.

Thanks Stefan.

John

Hi Stefan, Yet another twist to this tale See this K20D review on ephotozine link

Quote:
"Taken in RAW DNG, the colours are predictably muted.
Pentax say the PEF RAW file holds more information
so is a little better."

So we may be better sticking to PEF. It might be my monitor, but the DNG colours do look dull, but the grays look OK. On jpeg the greys look to have a blue tint.

shim

Shim,

I think what they mean is that they haven't applied any processing, i.e. the DNG was converted to JPG with "all sliders at 0". They don't provide any information with what RAW converter this was done. As this was the famous "desert outing" before the K20D was available I am assuming that they used Pentax PhotoLab.
Then I'm guessing further that the more information the PEF holds is the JPG development settings of the camera at the time of taking. If the DNG does not contain all image information then it would be completely pointless. Without the cameras JPG settings, that wouldn't be a big issue.

That's my take on it,
Prieni

That ask for a test Shim.
will download a colour card and test it.
I will be the one to say what RAW they are

I'm getting a bit confused!!

John