JPEG, WebP or TIFF: what to ask for and when
We deliver most images as high-quality JPEG, and a few customers ask us why. The honest answer is that for nearly all uses, JPEG is the right choice and the others solve narrower problems.
JPEG
It works everywhere, every design tool opens it, and a quality setting of 85 to 90 is indistinguishable from the original on a page. A 24 megapixel photograph comes to 6 to 9 megabytes. Its weakness is that every re-save loses a little, so always work from the downloaded file and not from a copy of a copy.
WebP
At the same visual quality, WebP files are usually 25 to 35 percent smaller. That matters on websites, where it saves load time, and not at all in print. We recommend it for the final export, never for the file you edit. Older software may not open it.
TIFF
TIFF does not lose quality when saved and keeps layers and 16-bit colour. It is also very large: a 24 megapixel image can be 140 megabytes. It makes sense when a printer asks for it, or if you plan heavy retouching with big colour changes. Otherwise it costs you time and disk space without any gain you can see.
A rule of thumb
Download JPEG. Edit and keep your layered file in whatever your tool uses. Export WebP for the web and a PDF for print. If a client asks for TIFF, ask them why.