I have just stitched some panoramas together and have saved the files as 16 bit tiff and 16 bit PNG to do further editing in DT. The PNG is 135 MB and The TIFF is 227 MB. The software I am using doesn’t support user input into compression. When I open the pictures in DT and use snapshots for direct overlay comparison I see no difference except the PNG is nearly half the file size. Is there a disadvantage using PNG vs Tiff for such large files that I am unaware of?
Depends…
They’re both lossless so there’s no difference in image quality.
The up to 50% difference in size is due to deflate (zip) compression that is built into PNG, but optional for TIFF. You potentially pay w/ slower I/O to compress/decompress, if that is of any concern.
Other than that, the PNG spec was kind of vague (and changed recommendations) on how color space signalling should work (not to mention Exif), so PNG color management and metadata might be spotty w/ some 3rd party SW.
P.S. Looks like you started a similar topic already?
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True and please forgive me. I learnt a lot from that first discussion and I asked the latest question because it seemed to me that since PNG provides so much more manageable file sizes for my panoramas that I would switch to them for this case scenario and just wanted to comfirm that there wasn’t something I was overlooking. Thanks for your informative response.
BTW, you may be able to compress PNGs further, losslessly, using optimisers like oxipng.
There are other projects as well.
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