 Jennifer E. Fitzsimmons |
Saving Final Edited Pictures I was hoping to get some advice on what size I should save my final edited picture. If I were to want to print at a later date and was not sure of the photo size at the time, is there a certain size that would be recommended without cutting out much of the photo if it had to be recropped? Thanks!
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chrisbudny.com - Chris Budny Contact Chris Budny Chris Budny's Gallery |
A simple answer would be to save your file at the largest possible resolution you can. Then you give yourself as many options down the road, for varying new crops or print sizes. Hopefully, you are saving your camera-original file as untouched, then working in a copy of that for your specific edits; save that as a different name/file, preserving the camera original. If you then resize your edited version down to say, 800 pixels for BP upload, save THAT as a new file - don't overwrite your "big" edited file.
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- Dennis Flanagan Contact Dennis Flanagan Dennis Flanagan's Gallery |
If storage space isn't an issue, I would save as a TIFF instead of JPEG.
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Peter K. Burian |
Yes! Save it as a TIFF. If you will modify it again, save, close ... re-open, modify, etc. a TIFF can handle that with minimal loss of quality. But a JPEG will definitely suffer a loss of quality.
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Ray Wallace |
Just to be clear, there is NO loss of quality with a TIFF file. It will even save all your layers if you are saving from Photoshop or Elements to a .tif. --Ray
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Kathryn Wesserling |
I learned the hard way - ALWAYS save your final editing work before resizing. Two of the best Digital Art pieces I ever did couldn't be printed large because of that. My resized version is always has an 800 in the file name. Also, to be 'safe', my originals immediately go into a sub-folder called "rawOrig". The converted versions are kept in "pspOrig", to be worked on. The finished versions go into "psp800" and "jpg800". Sounds like a lot of extra work, but it is sooooooo easy to mess up if you don't separate the files as you go.
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Peter K. Burian |
I agree, Kathy. The problem my students often have is this. They have a file like 123456.jpg They downsize it for sending by e-mail and overwrite the original. Now, the file is tiny. I always suggest renaming a file before doing anything to it, like 123456_C (and saving the file they will work on as TIFF) That way the original file will always remain available. And yeah, saving originals in another folder is a good idea too! P.
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Peter K. Burian |
Hi Ray. Of course, 90% of people are not working with layers. (None of my students -- or friends -- even knows what that means and many affordable programs do not even offer Adjustment layers) Multiple modifications to a TIFF will degrade quality if they are not working with adjustment layers. (Though most people will never notice that) But that's not bad compared to working on a JPEG, saving it, re-opening later making more modifications ... re-saving it, re-opening it later to make other changes, .... and so on. P.
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Ray Wallace |
I agree that Modifications to an image may degrade the quality of the image. I was just trying to clarify that using the tiff file format will not itself degrade an image, regardless of how many times you save or re-save the file. Which is quite different from using the jpeg file format, where the act of saving the image to a .jpg file will modify your image data, degrading the quality of the image.
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Kathryn Wesserling |
I forgot to mention that my conversion files always are renamed also. Main Folder = 11 0125 Auto Show Subfolders are.... RAW: Work in Progress: Editing done / resized for competition: Final jpg file for different contests (at this point, the file size I requirement are different, so I use a "b" or "d" or "z" in front of the "800" and save in each Contest Site's own folder:
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