Question: My wife is a photographer (Nikon D700, edits in Win7 Adobe CS5 suite) and mentioned yesterday that she's out of hard drive space. When I inspected, I found *GIGANTIC* .TIF files on her drive, ranging anywhere in size from 100MB to 4 ***GIGABYTES***.

I told her to save her final edits off as JPEGS and delete the .TIFs, but she said she can't do that for two reasons: 

* Her printing companies require TIF format
* If her clients want a picture redone or resized, she can't go back
to the JPEG as effectively as she could have with the tif format.

Both of these reasons seem more like the product of workflow issues to me, but I don't know enough about the art to make that call. As the financier of her operation, I have a few questions for the community:

1) Are file sizes like this normal? Is there a more friendly format that she can work in that doesn't require me to buy a new hard drive every few weeks? 

2) Is it possible that there is a knowledge gap somewhere and that she's missing a crucial step in her workflow? She demonstrated for me, and I watched in disbelief as a brand new 10 MB raw file without any edits turned into a *105 MB* TIF file.

I ask because these file sizes seem absolutely ridiculous to me. At this rate, she'll practically have to add a hard drive surcharge to every one of her shoots from now on...

Thanks in advance!

Answer: 
It sounds like she's saving uncompressed TIFs. Ps will give you various options such as LZW or ZIP compression when you save. Since TIFF is lossless you can safely choose any of them. JPEG is not a good alternative as it is lossy; you will lose image quality.
TIFF files saved with Perfectly Clear plugin for Lightroom in 16-bit format are 140 MB (from ~20-24 MB RAW files). Will definitely use 8-bit conversion in future!