About long term archival files...
In another thread I have been asked about a detail in my archival workflow and since it's related to the whole process I thought it makes sense to discuss it here, also because I'd like to have feedback in general about it.
During my life with Lightroom (up to Fall 2017) I simply didn't cope in a serious way with the problem of archival, even though I was conscious it had to be evaluated sooner or later (I was a member of the OpenRAW community that raised the issue of accessing very old digital photos). My workflow outputs were JPEGs for final consumption:
1. to be published to my website;
2. to be viewed on my laptop (a larger superset than the previous one).
Of course I did have a backup of the original RAW files, XMP sidecars and LR catalog that were the actual “archive” (in the sense that if I needed to retouch an old photo I just re-opened the RAW file in Lightroom and resume post-processing). They also went to optical backup.
When I switched to C1 the problem I knew it had to emerge became concrete: previously processed photos with LR had to be re-processed with C1, sometimes just for a light retouch (e.g. because I had to print them). Unfortunately in some cases they were shot with lenses that C1 doesn't explicitly support and don't have an embedded profile, as they are old. E.g. the Nikkor 12-24mm ƒ/4G DX AF-S has a visible and not trivial distortion that is particularly annoying for horizons. Some shots were taken with a fish-eye and “rectilinearised” with a LR plugin that is not available in C1. At the moment I'm stuck with these files and sooner or later I'll have to work on them (e.g. by resuming an old copy of Lightroom — I have prepared a Virtual Machine for the job — partially process and export them to DNG to be available for C1. A cumbersome path.
So I decided to have a new set of archival images: in my view, they can be “processed” or “semi-processed”, in the sense that most of them are good as they are, but some could undergo a further slight retouch for e.g. printing and such. So they preserve all the bits (not truncated to 8 as JPEGs) and the original colour space (I don't think converting to AdobeRGB would be a big deal — BUT consider that in 10 years, say, we could have new target colour profiles to convert the final images to, and archiving the original camera profile would save a intermediate conversion). They are 12-14 bit HEIF [1] files and could be retouched with one of the most popular applications of present and future — very important point, because of course there's no certainty that in my remaining 30 years of expected life I'll be always use C1 (or even C1 will always exist, or that very old camera/lens file formats/profiles will be kept alive, etc...).
In perspective, HEIF archival files could replace the output #2 mentioned above (the superset to be viewed on my laptop): there is currently a obstacle to this purpose, the fact that macOS Preview still doesn't support HEIF with more than 8 bits (a spectacular bug occurs) [2], but I hope that sooner or later it will be resolved.
Thoughts? I'd like to hear about alternate approaches.
[1] I'm not totally persuaded about HEIF, but at the time it's more supported than other high-compression, 12-14 bit alternatives such as JPEG latest iterations.
[2] Preview apparently opens the images (but it only renders a preview) and a few seconds later, slowly, the attempt to render the full HEIF results in a messy and green blob.
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Just a few thoughts...
I think you cannot export to HEIF in C1, can you?
Output format and bit-depth
AFAIK, uncompressed TIFF is generally the go-to format for preservation institutions, museums and alike. It is anticipated that this format is amongst those which will be supported really long-term.HEIF we don't know.
Support for Camera-specific raw formats we don't know, but gives you the highest flexibility. I keep them at all cost, btw. unmodified/straight from camera.
Output profile
I think the camera profile is not meant to be an output profile but rather only an input profile. You need to use a color space as your output profile.
The bigger the color space (AdobeRBG, ProPhoto even bigger), the more important is a high bit-depth, you otherwise risk banding in some images.
So, uncompressed TIFF ProPhoto 16-bit is a good choice.
Future developments
- More colors, but also HDR screens. Keep your raw files. If you export even to TIFF Prophoto, which is SDR, dynamic range will be compressed.
Last but not least, prints or photobooks are independent from the digital world and hence a good archive, the best or most important images deserve to be printed. Use a long-term archival paper and store appropriately.
Cheers,
BeO0 -
Last but not least, prints or photobooks are independent from the digital world and hence a good archive, the best or most important images deserve to be printed. Use a long-term archival paper and store appropriately.
^^^ THIS ^^^
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I think you cannot export to HEIF in C1, can you?
That's correct. Capture One can import HEIF, but it can't export in that format.
Ian
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TIFF for my photos would be 80-100MB per item, which at 2000+ photos per year per 25 years would need 4-5TB of space. It's definitely not a problem for an external storage (my main RAID backup is 12 TB) but I want to keep a copy of everything on my laptop internal SSD, and 8TB for a Mac laptop is way too expensive (2500€ of extra cost). But ok, I can study a way to have TIFFs going to the backup and a smaller format to stay inside the laptop SSD.
Printing 2000 photos per year would need a lot of space to store them, and would also be expensive. I agree that the final destination of a photo should be a print on paper, but I reserve this to the subset of the best picks (200 items per year).
For what concerns the profile, I don't see the archival file as a final output, but as a sort of standard format, semi-processed RAW (as I explained above) for my internal use only, so the camera profile being not an output profile would not be necessarily a problem. But yes, it might cause banding in some cases and I agree that ProPhoto is probably the best choice. So ok, I'll switch to it.
For what concerns HEIF, sure C1 doesn't support it, but I export to TIFF and later batch-convert with ImageMagick.
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Hi,
The profiles (better: color spaces) don't cause banding. A small bit-depth when using big color space might cause banding.
the camera profile being not an output profile would not be necessarily a problem
Yes, using a camera profile as an output profile would be wrong, that is not what camera profiles are made for. You need to use an output standard color space.
https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002479197-Colors-in-Capture-One
That's indeed what I meant, print a subset of the best picks, not 2000 per year.
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A small bit-depth when using big color space might cause banding.
It's what I thought before yesterday. But if you see my latest response to the banding problem I described yesterday, which you commented, there was banding in 16-bit TIFFs exported with the original camera profile. Banding disappeared after I re-exported the files with ProPhoto. I don't understand how it happened, but that's it. Maybe there are not really 16 bits (12/14 of course) in the file? But it would be a blatant bug, I don't think it's likely.
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