Hi,

When I render in P 2012 Pro I need uncompressed files (they are btw of very high resolution) as I further process them in Photoshop.

Which renders faster tif or psd, which one is of better quality ? What's the practical difference between them in terms of rendering in Poser ?

or render to HDRI.  more color range.

I want a compromise between render time and quality...

HDRI would take too long.

There's no difference in render time between TIF and PSD: the image only gets encoded and saved once the render's finished.

Quote - Hi,

When I render in P 2012 Pro I need uncompressed files (they are btw of very high resolution) as I further process them in Photoshop.

Which renders faster tif or psd, which one is of better quality ? What's the practical difference between them in terms of rendering in Poser ?

Interesting (and a bit uncommon) question. The visual quality is the same for both types, as far as i know. Also you can decide which image type to store your images in after having rendered them, so the rendering time is the same, too. Both image types will be compressed, if you absolutely want uncompressed you should use tga, and neither psd nor tif. Of the two psd and tif, tif will usually compress into a smaller image than psd. That means the speed of saving both image files actually depends on your computer. If you have a very slow disk drive (network drive or so), you are probably better off using tif, if you have a very slow CPU, but a fast disk (rendering on a netbook perhaps), you should use psd (faster saving because the compression is not good as with tif; in theory at least, on my computer both are so fast, that it is difficult to measure). Best is probably to profile it and make a decision on that.

Personally i would prefer psd when using photoshop, because the different layers get named automatically when importing into PS, which is easier than to import multiple TIF's for the different layers.

You might want to try saving them as a png. The png file is uncompressed and works perfectly in photoshop. It gives you the image with no background, if you don't want one. Then you just drop the image on your backgound in photoshop as a new layer.

As others have said, the render time would be the same for any format.

Depending on what kind of render settings you use, and if you intend on using Z depth maps etc, I would probably save as .psd.. that way you get your Z map and layer mask automatically added.  If you don't use those then either png or tiff etc would work just as well..

Do the files really have to be uncompressed?

PSD, TIFF, TGA and PNG formats have lossless or visually lossless compression schema, or the facility to select such when saving. (Actually these options don't seem to be available via the standard Export Image dialogue, but can be selected in D3D's Render FireFly Script.)

BMP is kind of old and clunky and there's no good reason to use that, but it would do the job.

JPEG is to be avoided - for saving renders from Poser - as there seem to be problems with compression artefacts (at least there were last time I checked, about four years ago). Avoid it anyway: if you've spent ages setting up and rendering your work of art you want to save it in a format that won't screw anything up. 

Poser internally works in 16bit-color, and stores its result (before exposting) as EXR in C:Users(user)AppDataRoamingPoserPro9Rendercache where they are deployed when comparing render results.

When exporting, this result is reformatted to either 16bit color (HDR, the EXR is a 1:1 export), or 8-bit color in which case all lossy formats (JPG) have to be avoided. The internal form of image data in a PSD file does not really differ from TIFF (ref http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/PhotoshopFileFormats.htm#50577409_pgfId-1054855 )

The advantage of PSD is that it comes in layers without requiring additional render passes for you. When you want more layers, there are some tools in the Scripts menu, while also Advanced Renderer (at RuntimeDNA) is very good at it. Those tools actually run a series of renders with different settings and export the layers as separate image files, so they will increase rendertime accordingly. But since you can adjust all light and shadow strength effects in Post, you'll be faster off in the end (this is how the pros work).

So; TIFF if you don't need the layers, and PSD if you do.

As saving to JPG should be the very last step in the workflow, and Gamma / Exposure Correction just the step before that, both have to be switched OFF when rendering. But you knew all that, of course.

addition to my last statement: if you want to keep all details in the darks, it might be better to have GC=ON when rendering / exporting, and correct for it (get it out, anti-correct) as the first step in Photoshop. From that point, turn the image into 16 bit per color, or in Lab-mode to prevent loosing the details when saving.

But please test for it, I haven't investigated upon this yet.

The file format you save your renders in would depend on the program that will be opening them for editing, whether it be for static images or sequenced images for animation.  Poser has already done its job and cares not what you do with its renders, for it does not know what you will save them as while rendering until the very last moment. :)

@ShawnDriscoll: see the initial post: "... as I further process them in Photoshop."

I'm just making sure you have the egg before the chicken and not the other way around.  :)  Because you were sounding backwards there for a minute.

Anyway, I try to render in PNG as often as I can now because I can have a transparent background then for when I layer renders over each other in a photo or video editor.