I just had a graphics company in town scan a small poster and create image files for me so that I could send them to relatives (the poster is a family heirloom).
They created a 220 MB jpg, a 950MB pdf and a 1.3 GB MSPaper file. I had never heard of the last one, researched it a little and it seems to be related to a tif file I think.
My question … Is the MSPaper file a common one that other graphics companies that my relatives might use to make prints?
Are there more common or better formats I should have the company I used create?
The JPG and the PDF will serve any purpose you could conceivably need them for. I have NO idea what MSPaper is, and have never heard any of my friends in photography mention it. They all operate in JPGs.
The PDF would be useful for printers. (PDF is a good format for preserving text and graphics, and making it more difficult (please, note, MORE difficult, not impossible) to alter them.
You mention that the poster is a family heirloom. While I should think that a .jpg is fine for “sending to relatives”, note that it is a lossy format. For preservation purposes, I’d think you’d want the original image in a lossless format (such as .tiff) that will store the maximal amount of image data.
While I’m not a computer graphics professional, I’ve also never heard of MSPaper. It sounds to me like it’s a choice of convenience for the shop (e.g., if they were using Photoshop, they’d have sent you a .psd). Personally, I’d request a (more) standard format, such as a .tiff.
That’s a “small poster”? How small? What DPI are they using? Those sure are humongous files sizes. Could it be overkill?
Without knowing the compression settings they used to make the JPG, no one can tell if it was high or low quality without close examination. And whatever data was discarded during compression cannot ever be recovered.
My suggestion, considering the archive requirements, is to use TIF with LZW compression. It’s the most universal format used professionally today. LZW has no loss, but may make the file significantly smaller. And for a typical poster, using more than 300 DPI is probably not worth it, depending on the makeup of the poster. If it was an enlargement of a snapshot, anything over 100 DPI is probably a waste of data and space.
Now a 35mm slide, that’s another matter entirely.
Never heard of MSPaper, and PDF was intended for a different purpose. It’s a poor choice for bitmapped, image-only files.
PDF is a horrible choice for scanned images. PDFs are good for things like graphs and logos drawn on a computer in a vector image program, such that they can be rescaled without looking any uglier than they ever looked. PDF isn’t even an image format: The name stands for Portable Document Format, and it is best at documents which are largely text.
TIFF is the best lossless image format if only because it is absolutely standard. MSPaper sounds like something that’s going to go away when Microsoft decides to reshuffle software in a few years.
MSPaper is a format intended to compete with PDF. All Office 2K3 installations get a virtual printer called Microsoft Document Image Writer or something. It’s a TIFF format image - no more, no less.
Rubbish.
PDFs are better than MSPaper, but still not good for scanned images. Postscript primitives like lines, fonted text, fills and paths can be scaled just fine, but scanned bitmaps still end up as (possibly uncompressed) postscript bitmaps at the scanned resolution. And you can’t edit PDFs easily.
I would ask for a TIFF file and be done with it. Rescale a copy to a reasonable size for your needs.
Not only is it going to go away, it has never arrived, and some preliminary research suggests that its originator doesn’t support it now.
While I agree with what everyone has said RE bitmaps/PDF, I have noticed that many high-thruput scanning systems are using PDF output anyway, probably because of the universality of the format. It also allows archivists to mix vector with bitmapped sources without making a distinction; the end user doesn’t care how it got there or even how much storage it takes, just that it can be easily viewed.