Saved as a Tiff, all of the attributes from the scanning process are retained, allowing further image processing later without loss of detail or definition. This format is recommended if you intend to do a lot of editing later, or if you require higher colour resolution. Tiff format files can be scanned and saved as 8-bit (24-bit colour resolution) or 16-bit (48-bit colour resolution). A 16-bit scan can be reduced to 8-bit, but not vice versa. For most practical purposes 16 bit scanning does not produce significantly visible differences, it can produce much finer steps in gradual colour changes and can allow very specific colour tone settings.

File sizes are approximately as follows, and depend upon the amount of cropping needed, CMYK files are about 35% larger: