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Newbie Help – Can’t Save Displayable TIFs
Hello! A new astrophotographer and new Photoshop CC user here, with a strange problem. Up until about 5 days ago, I could save a “shareable” version of an image in TIF format using the standard “discard layers and save a copy”. This morning, when I attempted to save my latest image, it was unreadable in everything except Adobe Bridge. If I saved as an uncompressed TIF, it wasn’t even readable in Adobe Bridge.
I tried all of the compression settings and color settings with no success. In looking back at past TIFs I saved, this wasn’t even an issue. I am able to save in JPG, but am puzzled as to why I can’t save TIF copies any more. I’ve attached a JPG of the latest image and a screen capture of the uncompressed TIF. I can still work and process in Photoshop.
Has anyone come across this before? Perhaps not a coincidence, a Windows update was pushed to my PC overnight. It has been restarted once and powered down/up once. Any insight or suggestions will be appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Gary
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5 Replies
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Hey, Gary! What bit depth are you working in? What format are your source images? Where are you sharing the finals (is it web or print)?
Have you tried merging all layers before saving to tiff? If you screenshot your export settings I can check that as well.
One more question – which program did you use to open the images screenshotted above?
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Hi Brendon –
Thanks for checking in and taking a swing at it!
I am working in 16 bit, since many of the astronomy actions I use need 16 bit.
The source file is a 32-bit TIF from a program called “Deep Sky Stacker”. It’s a program I’ve used for some time to combine the multiple (long) exposures into a single image. When I bring into Photoshop, my first two steps are to crop (get rid of the stacking artifacts) and convert to 16 bit.
As of now, I’m sharing my final images on the web (my Facebook page, to be precise), so JPG vs. TIF probably doesn’t make much difference. However, as I get better at astrophotography, I’d like to print out some of my better images, so I’ll eventually need to sort this out.
I’ve attached screenshots of each step/screen of the saving process. To get to the first screenshot, I click File > Save As… > Save on your Computer.
I used the basic Windows Pictures viewer to open the images. This used to work OK, and still does for older Photoshop TIFs and ones that come from Lightroom. However, I can only open the more recent TIFs in Photoshop or Bridge (Lightroom even chokes on them).
Thanks again for your help! Hopefully you can find where I have gone astray.
Gary
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Hi Brendon, sorry I missed one of your questions…yes, I tried “merging” and “flattening” the layers/image, same result in the output.
Thanks!
Gary
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UPDATE – I figured out a workaround. I saved a copy of my output file from Deep Sky Stacker as a 32-bit integer file, and I can save the edited images out of Photoshop as viewable TIFs!
Not sure what happened, or what the original format of the the output file is, but all’s well that ends well.
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Gary,
Sorry I wasn’t able to respond sooner. Glad you found a workaround!
I wonder if your issue has something to do with misinterpretation of an embedded alpha channel – I’ve seen something similar in video files. Next time you run into this, take a look under “channels”… if there’s an unintended alpha channel, you might try deleting it before saving out the new tiff.
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