Choose a File Format and Save Your Dog Photography Images

By Kim Rodgers and Sarah Sypniewski from Dog Photography For Dummies

Before you even visit the Save As dialog box, have an idea about how you’ll ultimately display your dog photographs, because this dictates the file format you choose. The two file formats you should concern yourself with are TIFF and JPEG, each of which has a very different purpose:

TIFF: Use this file format to save your photo as a high-resolution, print-ready file. TIFF files tend to be fairly large because they use lossless compression, meaning that the photo experiences no degradation in quality when you save in this format.

Always save your final, retouched, master image in TIFF format first before saving it in any other format.
JPEG: Use this file format to save your low-resolution, web-ready files. JPEG files are much smaller than TIFF files in size, but they use lossy compression, meaning that there’s a trade-off in image quality to achieve the smaller file size.

You can also save 300 dpi images in the JPEG format if you require a smaller file size or it’s specifically requested from your print shop, but always be sure you already have your file saved as lossless TIFF before doing so.

To save your image in Photoshop, do the following:

From the Photoshop toolbar, choose File→Save As.

Always be cognizant of choosing Save As (instead of Save). The Save command simply saves over your current file with its original name, whereas the Save As command gives you the option to rename your file to a unique name or save it in a new folder so you’re not saving over your master file.

This is one of those things you don’t want to learn the hard way! Accidentally ending up with a web-ready JPEG of your final photo you just spent an hour working on is never fun.
The Save As dialog box appears; if you want to rename your image file, you can do so now in the text field.
Choose the location where you want to save your file, whether that be your computer’s hard drive or an external drive.
From the File drop-down list, choose TIFF.

Several file-saving options appear as check boxes under the File drop-down list. Depending on the type of file format you choose, some of these options may not be available, but you should still know what these two basic options do:
1. As a Copy: Check this box if you want to save your file as a duplicate. Doing so appends the word “copy” to your file name.
2. Layers: Check this box if you used layers during editing and want to save them with your file; otherwise, the layers are merged and you can no longer manipulate them individually.
Click Save.
Now that you’ve saved your high-resolution master copy, feel free to do another Save As if you need to create a JPEG.

Simply choose JPEG from the File drop-down menu this time.