As I mentioned before, each manufacturer has a different file extension for their RAW files, and in the same way, each manufacturer offers different RAW processing software for their files. RAW, on the other hand, is not as universally supported – although it’s becoming more and more common. It’s one of the reasons TIFFs are so great for sharing images (plus, they’re lossless!). TIFF is widely supported by most photo editing and photo organizer programs across all platforms. For example, if you want to send a high-quality file to a client or to the printer.Ĭanon’s Digital Photo Professional interface for processing CRW, CR2, and CR3 files. I would advise using TIFFs when you don’t want your image compressed, but you don’t need it to be widely editable. But they don’t retain the slew of data present in a RAW file. Note that TIFFs, like RAWs, are uncompressed.

Most cameras don’t offer the option to shoot in TIFF normally, TIFF files are created when you save a scanned image as a TIFF file, or you save/export a fully edited photo as a TIFF. Any unprocessed information will be gone, so even if you change the file type, you won’t get the extra data. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to convert other types of files (JPEGs or TIFFs) to RAW. With a RAW file, nothing has been discarded, so you have all the data to work with (including additional highlight and shadow information). This gives you the most flexibility when editing your images and retains details from the shadows and highlights. That’s because RAW files contain the unprocessed information the camera recorded at the time of capture. RAW files are (almost always) produced by cameras. Notice how the highlights in the left image have some detail, while the highlights in the right image are clipped. The image on the right shows the same file, but first saved as a TIFF, then processed. The image on the left shows a RAW file processed and exported as a TIFF.

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