Each of the standard formats for printing was designed to fulfill a certain need and has unique advantages in certain conditions and workflows.
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
TIFF is an industry standard designed for the handling of raster or bitmapped images. It can save black-and-white (1-bit), grayscale, index color (256 color), RGB, LAB, and CMYK images. It supports 8 bits/channel and 16 bits/channel files, and various forms of compression. Saving in TIFF means that you can save or embed an ICC color space profile in the file, making it the format of choice in a colormanaged workflow. In other words, just about any application that can read bitmapped art will open TIFF files. The attractive aspect of TIFF files is that once placed in a program, you can edit, scale, and manipulate all aspects of the artwork!
A CMYK TIFF file will often print faster than another format because of the way the image data is sent to the printer. TIFFs offer a variety of file compression options, including the excellent “lossless” (nondegrading to image quality) LZW compression. Photoshop users can also compress files using lossless ZIP compression, and for higher compression rates and more compact file sizes they can choose “lossy” (degrading to image quality) JPEG compression.
In Photoshop CS, the TIFF format will save layers, adjustment layers, and spot colors, though at present these files can be read by very few applications. If you encounter a problem opening a Photoshop TIFF file in a layout program, you’ll need to reopen the file in Photoshop. Choose Save As from the File Menu, check Save: As a Copy, then uncheck any checked boxes pertaining to Alpha Channels, Layers, Annotations, and Spot Colors. Choose TIFF and click Save.