16bit TIFF needed for multi angle textures

[Tok Tok]

I'm currently scanning material with my new material scanner and process the photo's I make through Lightroom for white balancing and color correction. After that, I save the images as TIFFs in 16bit format te preserve a lot of light information. But these files are big and also take a lot of time to open and process in Substance Designer, so my question is, does Substance Designer need 16bit images to process the multi-angle images correctly? Or can I also save PNG's or even JPEG's from Lightroom and have the same quality? In the end, I just save jpegs from SD.

[Palirano]

You don't need that actually! Allegorithmic demonstrated how to make a material scanner with a smart phone. The materials look fantastic and they clearly do not come out in 16-bit TIFF format

[Tok Tok]

No actually in one of the last steps, before going into SD, they save all the images to TIFFs.

[Nicolas Wirrmann]

Using jpeg is not advised: it's a lossy format and can store only 8bit data per channel.

Disabling the compression for the tiff file will speed up the encoding/decoding process. You can use png as well as it support 16bit.

[Tok Tok]

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. Using a 16bit format results in better quality images.

Also good tip about not using compression on the TIFF files.