What's the diff between TIFF & RAW?

[tbteng]

Hope to get more enlightened in this area...I have seen people shoot in RAW and my camera also has a TIFF mode. What's the difference between the 2 since they are roughly the same in size during the saving process?

 

[leonzhu]

Hope to get more enlightened in this area...I have seen people shoot in RAW and my camera also has a TIFF mode. What's the difference between the 2 since they are roughly the same in size during the saving process?

TIFF and RAW the same size? HARDLY.

RAW format (depending on manufacturer) will save the raw data extracted from the CCD/CMOS/JFET sensor. All other settings (WB, Sharpening, etc) are saved as sidecar information. thus you will have the original data captured, no matter what the setting. This allows you to change all these settings easily in post-process.

TIFF format saves the processed image information, without compression. Somehow it works out to be larger in size than RAW. without the flexibility of RAW.

 

[tbteng]

I haven't used TIFF before, I have shot in RAW before but did a coversion to JPEG during saving...but I have a couple of friends that tell me that I should save my files in TIFF as it preserves the image quality...

Since TIFF is not better than RAW, shouldn't we be saving it as RAW instead? What's the rational behind saving as TIFF pls?

Thanks for all your advice in advance....