LZW compression for TIFF output

[multitech]

I would like to see an LZW compression option for TIFF output, especially when saving animation frames.  Hundreds of 1080 resolution TIFF images can use up a few Gigabytes on a hard drive. 

I don't like to use JPG format because Keyshot compresses the images too much.  I'll render as a TIF or PNG and convert them to JPG in Photoshop with the quality slider set to max.

Mike 

[Abigail111]

Hi there.
To be honestly,i have never compress tiff files or convert tiff to jpeg using LZW.I never hear of that one.I usually do the tiff compressing using a tiff processing add-on which i have paid some money.
Although it's not free,but it's safe and effective.

[lucywill]

you can use a an image converter to convert jpeg to tiff or to png and then use a tiff control to compress the image , if you don't like jpeg.

[andy.engelkemier]

So if you are having a noticeable compression issue with jpeg, then you've probably got to change that. I believe it's linked to the screen grab preference. Set that to 100% and you shouldn't notice a difference. If you compare that jpeg to the same jpeg that photoshop would save you don't notice a difference.
That being said, there IS a difference. But you won't see it in prints or edits unless you change the brightness more than 2 stops, and that's only for very saturated colors.

PNG has better compression than jpg, but they are also not as small. But they are Much smaller than tiffs.
LZW also must be licensed. That's why not everything supports it.

Your best bet for animation is png if you're using after effects, unless you want 32bit for some cool relighting effects (which will also grind your previews to a snails pace).

One thing to recommend for this is to use something like fast stone image resizer. You can just select all of your tiff files and resave them with lzw or zip compression. It's free for personal use, or something like 20 bucks. I did that at my last job. I'd just have it pound through a couple hundred images over lunch and folders would drop for 20GB down to something like 1.5

[rudenaggar]

Use LZMA 2 unless you are looking to extract the archive on a system that cannot deal with LZMA 2 archives. Generally speaking most modern compression algorithms give roughly the same compression, and with regard to the number of cores that you can use at once, it is up to you to decide how many you want to use. Generally speaking (unless you are creating large archives) there is no reason to need more than one though. In addition, with multiple cores doing the compression, the bottleneck may become the hard drive.



Unlike the DEFLATE algorithm, 7-Zip's LZMA uses solid compression by default, which takes advantage of inter-file redundancy. This will work with default settings as long as the files are small enough. With the default settings of 2 GB for Solid Block size, a 16 GB file is actually compressed as 8 separate chunks. As @Breakthorugh already said, the dictionary gets generated on the fly. You can verify this empirically by setting Solid Block size to Solid (compress all files at once) and Non-solid (compress each file separately). Increasing the Solid Block size will actually result in a slow-down, but it may result in a much better compression ratio. For example, compressing two identical files will result in an archive almost twice as big with non-solid compression.

Nag

[multitech]

Thanks for the replies guys.  I've been using PNG files for a while now.  They seem to be the best balance of quality and file size for me.

Mike