Huge TIF photos when using Lightroom & Photoshop to edit RAWs?

kbevphoto

I have a glitch in my workflow that slows me down a little. I am certain that I just need to change the setting in LR. I'm looking for advice on the best settings for what i'm trying to do.

I post a lot of my work in Instagram. I have steps in my Lightroom workflow to ID the photos I want to use there. I open them in PS from LR to crop them into square prints the way I want them. I take a RAW image, open in PS, crop it, then save it back to my LR catalog. Issue: PS creates a 200+ MB file every time i do this! What's worse, is that I then need to use my preset to export it for IG (watermark, sizing, etc) and it creates a 500-800k file that I can easily post. So i have this temporary giant file that slows everything down. I go back and remove the mega-files from my catalog, because i don't need them - but damn, they take up room and it seems silly.

My question: How can I have PS create a more reasonably sized photo automatically. I could resize them in PS, but it's just a prep file and I don't want to do it for every photo I plan to share. Currently, LRs external file handling is: TIF, 16bit, 240 resolution...

I just don't see how a 50MB RAW file becomes a 250MB behemoth...

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

KBev

PS I know that IG allows for non-square prints and also that LR crops. Neither of those work for what I like to do.

AceCo55

You might find it is the 16bit causing this?
see this thread: https://dgrin.com/discussion/260913/tiff-file-size-mac-vs-pc#latest

Richard

I realize you said that LR alone doesn't work for you, but I'm a little curious why not? Seems like it can do everything you mentioned. Dunno, maybe I'm missing something.

pathfinder

I don't understand it either Richard.

Why go to PS to crop, when the cropping tool in LR is so much. much better and easier to use?

I try to never crop in PS anymore if I can possibly avoid it.

Does instagram require a pass through PS for some uploads or something? I don't use Instagram to maybe I am missing something.

I wonder if the square cropping in PS is also uprezzing the image size in pixels maybe, to explain the increase in file size from a 50MB Raw file to a 250mb tiff.

Richard

I haven't done cropping in PS for a while now, but I don't think it does anything to add pixels unless you resize as a separate step. I would guess that the huge TIF size is due to a combination of unneeded alpha channels, lack of compression and bit depth.

kdog

That's normal for uncompressed 16-bit TIFFs which use 6 bytes per pixel. For example, since you mentioned 50MB raws which is similar to a a Nikon D800 with 38MP. In that case you'd have 6x38 or 228MB TIFFs.

And yes, do your cropping in LR for sure.

kbevphoto

I should have known that regardless of my effort to avoid the discussion, the DGrinners couldn't resist.... 8- )

The issue for me is that LR copping won't "expand the space" from what I've seen. You can actually drag the corp area beyond the boundary of the photo and it adds dead space. I prefer to post square pictures on IG. If I want to keep the full image intact when I post, I need to expand a 4x6 original to a 6x6. That is basically adding "blank area" to the pictures. PS also allows me to set the color of those blank spaces so I can add a little more pop to it if I want. In a sense, I'm not cropping OUT part of the image. I'm actually cropping IN dead space to keep the whole image intact. It has the added benefit of reducing the intrusion of my watermark on the original image, since it is often all/mostly in the dead space that i add. Does that make sense? Examples; @KBevPhoto

I would be THRILLED if someone made a LR plugin that let me "covert to 1:1" by adding the dead space to the originals. I do this across all of my IG feed (5 total) It's not too time consuming, but it can be a PITA when it slows down to save.

Back to my original question: Thanks for that last reply KDog. Is there a different setting I should use what I'm doing to get that file size down? Would a macro of some sort to resize the image be an option? I'm open to other ideas...

And if there is a way to do the type of cropping in, then not only will i feel like an idiot (I'm actually not a LR noob), I'd be grateful for pointing it out...

Richard

OK, I think I understand the problem now. You have a few options, but you may not like them.

You can reduce the size of the intermediate files by using an 8 bit TIF instead of 16. This might cause some minor color shifts, but since jpg is 8 bit anyway, it may not be noticeable. Also, you should use TIF compression to further reduce the size. It's lossless compression, so there's no reason not to do this in any event.

Now about the "cropping"--about the only thing that occurs to me that would avoid a big intermediate file would be to export jpgs from LR into a folder, then run a PS droplet over the whole folder that would resize the canvas. This would only work well if all the pics have the same dimensions to start with, which I'm guessing is not the case. If you have some programming experience, it's probably possible to do a more sophisticated form of resizing using PS scripting to set the canvas resize parameters according to the actual image dimensions. You could then run the script either as a droplet or as an export action. If none of that makes any sense, then this is probably not a good choice for you

kbevphoto

Thanks. I think the best answer to avoid mega files will be to export smaller JPGs and work with those. THey'll add another step to my workflow, but when prepping a bunch of these the saved time from working with so many huge TIFF should be a net positive.

I'm curious if any of the people from earlier is the thread had other comments/ concerns about why i use PS to crop. I'm still hoping there's a chance I'm missing something about LR

Richard

I know of no way to add blank area outside the frame in LR. Dunno. Exporting jpgs from LR then adjusting them in PS is probably your best bet.

ziggy53

I don't use Lightroom, so no way to test this, but it looks like the Print module has the facility to place a border around the photo. Using a "square" template it looks possible to pad the image to a square aspect ratio without cropping any of the image area. Batch mode also looks possible.

From: https://lenscraft.co.uk/add-an-image-border-in-lightroom/

These videos show how to make a custom template: https://youtu.be/CfaPTc1NYbY

https://youtu.be/QhPJ6Yoyt9s

kbevphoto

Hi all -
Just a quick follow-up here. I didn't solve the exact problem, but I did find a way to easy the burden a little bit . The new aspect ratios on Instagram (portrait: 5:4, Landscape 1.92:1) allows me to crop into a format that is usable. For 75% of my photos, I can get the parts I want in the new crop area.

In other words, I can crop them the way I want them and export directly from Lightroom with my watermark. For the other 25%, I still go to Photoshop. The keystroke to resize the image also helps keep the size down. It's manual, but it works fine.... It doesn't take more time to resize because it already takes a few seconds to save the massive TIFF (which is now a much smaller one)

Anyway, thanks for the ideas..