Printing - image format, 8 or 16bit

[Alex Wimmer]

Hi,

I am about to self-publish a small publication, roughly 50 double pages, A4 landscape format - a kind of photo book with little text, printed in small quantities.
Images will be approx. 10" x 6.5" (23.7cm x 15.8cm) at 300dpi. Image will be prepared by me and page layout will be also done by me in Quarxpress.
I plan to provide a full resolution (300dpi) lossless compressed PDF in sRGB to printing services.

For quality web pictures, I usually go from RAW (NX2) -> TIFF (PS) 16bit -> JPEG 8bit (+resize), but as far as printing goes I am a total rookie.

So, should I use 300dpi TIFF's in 8-bits (or even 16-bit) or just use 300dpi 8-bit JPEG's (at 100% quality, lossless) for photos?

I am asking this because in my preliminary tests, file sizes get really huge, and putting them in one quarkxpress document and finally in PDF produces enormous sizes and totally slows down editing.
If there is no significant differences betwen these format and huge size advantage, I would choose JPEG then.

What are your experiences?

Thanks

[William Malacarne]

I would think this should be discussed with the printing service...they are not always the same.

Bill

[Roger Clark]

Alex,
I agree with Bill. But in my opinion, if you've processed the images for printing the dynamic range is small so 8-bit should be fine.

Roger