Choose My File Format for Jumping Over to Photoshop?

When you take an image over to Photoshop, you can send it either as a TIFF or PSD file (and you can choose the color space and bit depth, as well, while you’re there). You choose these in Lightroom’s Preferences dialog (under the Lightroom [PC: Edit] menu) by clicking on the External Editing tab up top, and then choosing which one you want from the File Format pop-up menu. Personally, I choose PSD format because it keeps all the data fully intact, and because PSD is Photoshop’s native file format, the file is dramatically smaller than a TIFF file, without losing any quality. I would say that TIFF is a pretty outdated file format in general, with a big downside being huge file sizes and not much upside, besides the fact that you can open TIFFs in lots of other applications. But, if you’re just going to edit the image in Photoshop, why not keep the file size small? You can always choose a different file format to save the image in later, when you
export it out of Lightroom, like JPEG or even TIFF at that point, although just for the record, I never save in TIFF format. Ever.