Digital Light & Color

I was trying to figure out if compressing 48 bit TIFFs makes practical sense. It's a regular image with lots of skies and some, but not much noise. I can almost understand why the compression is not impressive, but why LZW would make the file larger?

I can't speak to the details of LZW TIFF or the implementation in the Microsoft library, but it can be proven that no compression scheme makes every possible input smaller. Just compressing a 1000x1000 solid color image generates a 46kb LZW file and an 11kb ZIP file, so there is clearly more overhead with LZW.