Saving a tif

[brucet]

Hi. I'm a new user of Photoline. Still trialing it!
One small question. I need clarification of the terms used for saving a tif file. I use exclusively 16bit tifs. I don't want to work with 8bit. So my questions is - How do ensure I'm working with 16bit files? (I'm converting from NEF's on Nikon's NX-D saving the files as 16bit tifs). I see a number of options under Save As but which tif option should I use?

regards

[photoken]

How do ensure I'm working with 16bit files?

The program's Title Bar will show the bit depth of the image:

titlebar.png

If the image is 8-bit, the description will only say "RGB Image". Other bit depths will be specified.

AFAIK, saving as a TIF file will always use the bit depth of the image being edited. You can change the image's bit depth in the Layer Properties panel:

layer props.png

[brucet]

Thanks Ken.
Problem is I don't have a Title Bar. Well I may have but it has gone and I can't find where/how to restore it.
The rest I have now found.
Thanks.

regards

[bkh]

How do ensure I'm working with 16bit files? (I'm converting from NEF's on Nikon's NX-D saving the files as 16bit tifs).

No need to worry. If the TIFF is 16 bits, PL will automatically work in 16 bit mode. (Dragging a TIFF into an 8 bit document is different – the layer will still be 16 bits but some calculations may be 8 bits only).

I see a number of options under Save As but which tif option should I use?

Regardless of what you choose, your tiffs will be 16 bit. "Class 3" and "Class 4" will just save uncompressed TIFFs because they are monochrome formats (called CCITT Group 3 and Group 4 in the TIFF specs). So you have the choice of "Uncompressed" (called "unpacked" in PL) and two types of lossless compression, LZW and ZIP. Usually, for 16 bit photographs, neither LZW nor ZIP work too well (sometimes files get larger, especially with LZW, and they take much longer to save), so you might as well use "Uncompressed". Nikon Capture NX-D can't display compressed TIFFs, if that's of any interest to you.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[brucet]

Thanks bkh. That helps a lot.

At the moment my only other issue is the terminology used. But I'll figure it out!!

regards

[photoken]

At the moment my only other issue is the terminology used. But I'll figure it out!!

One of the things it took me a while to understand is PL's use of the terms "Mask", "Lasso", and "Selection". Hopefully this clarification can help you:
http://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.ph ... ion#p37429

In addition, there's this mini-tutorial where I attempted to illustrate the concepts:
http://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.ph ... 434#p32252