TIF images lose sharpness

Anna from Michigan, United States, using Photoshop CS with Mac OSX, writes in with:

[Quote:]
I have been working for two days on some images. Some of them I have been working on in Tiff and some in Photoshop format. I have sharpened, color corrected and edited them. Then, when I go back to them and look at them in the browser they look perfect and then I open them and they have lost a whole lot of sharpness!!!

What has happened to them?

Everyone has always recommended to me to work in tiff and Photoshop formats instead of jpeg but I seem to be losing a lot of information- and this has not been over a long period of time- only hours! What can I do, these need to look good for my client. I have never had this problem before.
[End Quote]

If you can provide a good answer to this question, then comment below. Thanks for your help!

Comments

[Daitenshi]

Do you use any kind of compression while saving your tiff files?

While uncompressed, tiff is a lossless format, so the problem wouln't lies there. Can you reproduce this problem using other formats such as jpeg or eps?

[PS 911]

Saving a compressed TIF from a JPG file is pointless. So, unless you're working with raw Photoshop files, saving as TIF will not be an advantage. Let's assume you are indeed working with Photoshop files.

Saving as a TIF gives you three options in image compression:
1) NONE
2) LZW
3) ZIP

Make sure the image mode is set to CMYK, and NOT "Indexed Color" ... while you can save an indexed color image to TIF, it's not recommended.

To retain ALL of the fidelity of the image, check the "NONE" setting. This might result in a very large file, but you'll retain all of the sharpness.

You should also flatten the file before saving, and use "Save As..." so the original file stays untouched.

If "Layer Compression" is not grayed out, that means you still have layers in the file, and you should use RLE compression.

Why you just started having the problem is a factor we cannot guess. Perhaps just the recent images? Or, perhaps the preferences got reset? Or, perhaps you've been saving over the same file, each time losing image quality?

Let us know how it comes out.

Good day. Photoshop well.

[Barbarian]

Well having read the asnswer to this Q, with all respect to the writer, i have one more question....How can converting an image to CMYK before saving it to TIFF save information when the colour gamut of CMYK is much less than RGB.....

[mikias]

I like the way you teach me!!!
Thank you!