Photoshop Compression

[Soilworker]

We're in the process of moving away from a 3rd party compression utility. Instead we've decided to work with native Photoshop compression. The question is which one to use?

We've toyed around with a few ideas such as TIF or EPS w/jpeg compression but I don't like the idea of using lossy compression. The simplest idea would seem to be to use TIFs w/LZW compression but years back I recall hearing to avoid it like the plague. I've heard rumblings that is no longer the case, though.

Can anyone recommend a particular avenue to take? Do you find any issue with LZW compression now a days? Problems at RIP time etc? What are the pro's and cons?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Soilworker

[mattbeals]

I've had problems with LZW compression and having corrupted data when de-compressing. I haven't had that problem with ZIP compression though. That's not to say it can't happen, I just haven't run into it. And where the corruption was introduced I have no idea. The big push against LZW that I remember was with PDF/X-1a not allowing it. So I always use flate/ZIP compression when saving PDF's. As for images themselves i leave the original JPEG intact and save a copy as a TIFF. If I feel the need to compress the TIFF I'll use ZIP compression.

[Soilworker]

Thanks, Matt. The research I've been doing has been pointing towards ZIP as well. Looks like it's time to do some testing and see what flies and what doesn't.

Thanks Again,
Soilworker

[Padzilla]

I used to use LZW all the time, I never had problems with it. Then there was a Photoshop version, I believe it was CS2, that would get corruption lines in images. They put out a fix for it, I remember, but I had switched to ZIP, by then.

[Soilworker]

I tried LZW and ZIP. The problem is that for our really intense large images that we really want to crunch neither one does much compression at all. It makes sense, though, both compression algorithims remove redundant strings of data and there just aren't too many in those sorts of images. It looks like we're going to have to stick with using TIFs with jpeg compression.

Oh well.