Your comments are at odds. First you say:
did not initially realize that jpegs deteriorated every time you transferred them from one format to another.
Here you state "transfer" as going from one format to another. So yes, a JPEG to an uncompressed TIFF, and then back to a JPEG will indeed degrade the image. Not from TIFF step (unless you used JPEG compression in the TIFF process), but saving the image again from a TIFF to a JPEG does cause JPEG compression be applied again, degrading the image further.
Anyway, then you state:
I found that TIFF's, although larger, were less likely to degrade in transference than jpegs.
I'm probably not reading it the way you intend, but do by transference, do you mean just copying a TIFF from one drive or disk to another? If so, then it's 100% impossible for the image to be degraded in the least. A copy at the OS level from one drive to another is always a 100% perfect, bit for bit copy. That applies to absolutely anything you copy, not just images. Copying an image, no matter what it's format, cannot degrade it. Not even a JPEG. You're copying it, not opening and re-saving.
Having researched it appeared that jpeg 2000 solved both problems in that they were more stable when transferred and smaller in size.
Again, there's nothing the least bit more "stable" about a JPEG 2000 image over another format. Not one tiny bit. Stability is in the hands of the OS copying a file exactly from one drive to another without damaging it. A flaw in the process could damage a Word document, or any other file type the same way. And that's missing, or damaged information that didn't copy as an exact duplicate of the source.
JPEG 2000 uses a different compression scheme than the original JPEG format, but it's still lossy, and you're still permanently destroying your original image, assuming you started with an uncompressed format. Once the pixels have been averaged, or tossed out (repeated as the same pixel color next to it), they're gone. You cannot get a JPEG back to its original, uncompressed state.
Here's some comparison data:
I took a handful of test TIFF images and saved them as TIFF with LZW compression; TIFF with ZIP compression; and JPEG at the highest quality level (noted as 12 in Photoshop), baseline Standard. Note that LZW and ZIP compression in TIFF is lossless. Image quality never changes.
All sizes in MB.
Uncompressed TIFF:
File 1: 52.7
File 2: 13.8
File 3: 10.4
File 4: 8.1
TIFF with LZW compression:
File 1: 17.7
File 2: 5.8
File 3: 5.6
File 4: 5
TIFF with ZIP compression:
File 1: 15.5
File 2: 5.1
File 3: 5.1
File 4: 4.6
JPEG level 12
File 1: 7.3
File 2: 2.8
File 3: 2.5
File 4: 2
If saving space is your only concern then the nod goes to JPEG of course for total space savings, but you're still losing image data, even on the first save.
TIFF with ZIP is slightly better than LZW, but takes a long time to save and open, and older software titles may not be able to open them.
TIFF with LZW saves almost instantly compared to ZIP (almost the same as uncompressed) and has been around forever. Pretty much any image editor can read it.
You can save a TIFF with JPEG compression, but there's no point in doing that. You are then literally saving a JPEG image within the TIFF format. It is then exactly the same as saving the image as a JPEG to start with.
I hope I have made the right choice and that the images and documents I have created and burned to gold Blu Ray discs will survive me. Only time will tell.
They'll last a little longer than standard Blu-ray disks, but not by much. Ignore the hype that gold disks are 100 year disks. They aren't. Yes, the gold reflective layer will indeed last far longer than a standard aluminum layer, but it's the dye that won't hold up. When you burn a disk, the dots and dashes which represent ones and zeros are darker spots in the dye layer. The dye isn't very viscous, but over time, even stored out of any source of light, the dyes will run back together and your data will become corrupted. Good quality disks and gold layer disks will both last about 10 years. I store all of my business data on 50 GB disks. I mark the date they were written on the disk. At the 10 year point, I copy everything off and burn a new disk.
