Picnik Downsizes Files

WinsomeWorks

I was excited about trying some quick lighting / color fixes on Picnik, having just stumbled on the site recently. On the first file I fixed (autocolor and a very tiny crop), I was surprised when, as I went to overwrite the original with the fix, I was warned that the file was 74% smaller than the original. (I don't remember the exact word-- it may not have said "smaller" but something to that effect). This seemed odd since I'd only trimmed off a millimeter. The file size had dropped a lot-- each side was now in the 2000s instead of 3000s like the original! I saved it anyway, and sure enough it's that much smaller.

So on the next photo I took into Picnik for color fixing, I simply did autocolor and tried to save that back to SmugMug. Again I got the same message-- warning, file is 74% smaller ! Odd, since I hadn't done even a small crop. I was not able to figure out why this was happening or how to keep it from happening again. With that much drop in file size, it will surely affect print quality. Any ideas on this?

devbobo

At this point, Picnik has a limitation of outputting a maximum of 2800x2800 pixels, which is apparently a flash limitation. Hopefully, that will change at some point.

http://www.picnik.com/info/api/reference/_out_maxsize

Cheers,

David

WinsomeWorks

exposure correction "in-house"?
Aww, that's a real shame. I'd thought it was the proverbial "answer to prayer" for some of the lighting/color correction limitations here. I suppose I could save originals for now & hide them in the gallery & use the corrected ones for display purposes, but I was hoping to print the corrected photos. Anyway, so that leads me to another question. I've wondered why SmugMug doesn't have more capability for simply adding or subtracting exposure on individual photos and whole groups as well. I know there's the "auto color" choice, and at times that will effectively lighten or darken something that needs it. But if the photo is at all contrasty, it often won't help much. I wouldn't be wondering this if it weren't a feature on even the worst of the sites for photo printing. And obviously we have a humongous set of tools here in just about every other area that others don't have. But it just seems that lightening or darkening capability is the most common need, & the first thing I'd expect to be able to do. It would save a ton of re-uploading & PS fixing for whole shoots that are dark. If we had that, I'd rarely ever need something like Picnik! Is there any hope for it?

Andy

WinsomeWorks wrote:

Is there any hope for it?

Stay Tuned.

WinsomeWorks

Andy wrote:

Stay Tuned.

OOoooooooooohhhhh... shiver shiver!! Ok, I'll invest in large quantities of dark chocolate, tea and mohnkuchen in order to keep from biting my fingernails off! And now I need to admit that I haven't yet worked on learning the bulk editing tools in CS2, and that's my own deficiency. So perhaps you should tell me it's a long way off to force me into taking the time to learn! Partly the thing bugging me w/ that is that I shoot Jpgs and dislike the idea of correcting a whole batch that needs it w/o converting to PSDs. I could convert them all to PSDs to work on them, but the amt. of space needed for that (I'm thinking of entire band shows that are dark & I've taken hundreds of shots) is a little nuts.... generally I'm only converting the few that are actually worth editing for stock or whatever to PSDs. Maybe others have solutions to this that I haven't thought of--- already have external memory, but wow I could fill it up real fast.