The longevity and preservation of TIF files

[Anbaric]

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On 4/1/2022 at 2:17 AM, hirohhhh said:

I have some quite complicated tif files with lots of masks and layers and adjustments, smart filters etc. I'm thinking, down the road, in 10-20 years, would they render the same as they do today. If I open this very same tif file in Photoshop 2040, would it look identical, or Adobe may change the algorithm that renders those pixels. Would it be wise and safe to have a backup of flattened TIFs, or even 100% JPGs.

Same could be said for DNGs, but in my case, TIFs are more important because I put a lot more effort into editing. My DNGs are just few sliders in Lightroom, so nothing to worry about even though it that changes slightly over time.

What do you think?

Plain tiff files are well documented and will be around forever. But to store more complex things like layers, Adobe added non-standard extensions. That's fine for Adobe (the format is designed for extensibility), but there's no guarantee that any other software can do anything useful with this proprietary data. Open a multi-layer tiff file created in PS in a simple editor like Irfanview, and it appears as a flattened image, a 'lowest common denominator' that has been saved to the file to maximise compatibility (you might want to experiment with how well this represents how you want the image to look; I don't know if it fully reflects everything you can do in PS). Open the same file in a more sophisticated editor like Affinity Photo and you can access the layers separately, because the Affinity developers have taken the trouble to add additional compatibility with at least some of Adobe's extensions, though I don't know how well more complex things are supported. Will Adobe retain compatibility with their own tiff extensions over decades? I don't think it's possible to say (perhaps Adobe won't even be around in its current form 20 years from now). So if you want to be sure you'll be able to return to your current rendering of the image in the longer term, and you aren't happy with how a complex tiff with PS extensions looks in a simple image viewer that doesn't support layers today, it would be wise to save a vanilla tiff or a high quality jpeg with the edits baked in.

Edited April 19, 2022 by Anbaric