I am heading up a project at my local Historical Society where we are scanning our archives of photographs, newspaper clippings, documents, etc. We are using PhotoImpact 4.2 with a Microtek 9600XL scanner. These will eventually be burned onto CD's for storage/distribution.

My question is what would be the best graphic file format for the "master" copy? I was leaning toward TIF/TIFF but now I am reconsidering and looking at PNG. Any thoughts and ideas would be helpful.

- Tom

-- Tom Monahan (tmonahan@hotmail.com), April 15, 1999

Answers

TIF is a very safe, cross-platform format with a lossless compression scheme available (LZW). It is also easily used in DTP, WP and graphics apps. PNG was for a little while looking like a good option, but it has not really caught on much.

-- Ron Reznick (trapagon@earthlink.net), April 15, 1999.

I do strongly recommend TIF file format for your master copy.

-- Fred (tabarrok@ariver.com), April 28, 1999.