10-06-2011, 11:47 PM

I don`t have Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperature - so iPhoto is what I am stuck with, like it or not.

I have some photos - let`s say half are JPEGs and half are RAWs (in the beginning I was shooting JPEG, but switched and won`t go back now - I love RAW).

They are all saved masters in HDDs. So I am not concerned about the originals.
But I am concerned about JPEG vs. TIFF debate, so I want everything as a lossless file type, TIFF being the winner for me.

I know that iPhoto makes a JPEG copy of the original file to work on. I also know when I export, I can export a 16-bit TIFF. No problem.

But when I IMPORT my JPEGs and RAWs to iPhoto, should I do my edits (rotate, crop, color correction, etc) and then export as TIFF?

OR

Should I import my JPEGs and RAWs to iPhoto and immediately export as TIFF without making any changes or edits and then import the TIFFs back to iPhoto for editing?

I am lost as to what process will give me the least amount of irreversible loss to the image quality.

I had one guy on Apple Forums say that iPhoto is a lossless application, and all edits do not affect quality, even as JPEGs. I find this contrary to 99.9% of the photo world.

10-07-2011, 11:38 AM

As far as been able to glean, the degredation of image only happens when you SAVE as jpeg so both your ideas will give the result but the second is just more work.

10-07-2011, 11:03 PM

Originally Posted by frownsarefun

I had one guy on Apple Forums say that iPhoto is a lossless application, and all edits do not affect quality, even as JPEGs. I find this contrary to 99.9% of the photo world.

He was technically correct in a way, but generally that answer is wrong.

Perhaps what he meant was that you can make all the edits you want to a picture and your "original" is never actually touched -- if that's the case, then he's right. But that's not the same as truly "nondestructive" editing.

iPhoto (interally, not obvious to the user) makes a dupe of the photo when you start editing it -- so you have an "edited" copy and the "master" copy so that you can always "revert to original." But the edited one, if it's a JPEG, is re-saved each time you perform an edit and then move on to another picture, which diminishes quality.

I don't know if that's the case when the "original" is a TIFF. I assume iPhoto would save it back as a TIFF and thus you don't have to worry about quality.

Overall, iPhoto is an adequate but not idea program for someone who is going to be working almost exclusively in RAW *and* wants to do a lot of editing. I'd suggest something like Aperture or Lightroom for that, perhaps with Photoshop for more serious editing.