Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
Scott W wrote:
The raw filewill me much smaller since its format is much more
efficient. Take a 8 MP camera, the in the raw file there are 8,000,000
pixels each of which needs only 12 bits of data, therefore and
uncompressed raw file should come in right about 12 MB, with lossless
compression this shrinks to between 8 to 10MB. A tiff file from this
same camera will have three colors / pixel (note the raw file only has
one per pixel) and it will use 16 bits / color or 48 bits per pixel
compared to 12. When I convert to 48 bit tiff files the resulting file
is right around 48 MB in size, which is why I don't like to keep the
tiff fills around.

Only if compressed will you see a difference [minus the metadata]. Data is
data. RAW is only smaller than TIFF for two reasons; the first is that
there is often compression applied (TIFF can also be compressed, but often is
not), and second is that typically RAW is 12-bit and TIFF is 16-bit. There is
no reason you can't have a 12-bit RAW (in fact, that is basically what you get
when you convert to DNG format as DNG format is based upon the TIFF format and
DNG is a true RAW file, preserving the linear data with or without lossless
compression).
You are missing the big reason, 1 color / pixel for raw vs. 3 colors /
pixel for tiff.

Scott