Picture Size?

Tom Vervaeke

Does Smugmug still have the 8MB per uploaded file limit? I bumped into it occasionally when sending up pics from my G6 which is a 7.1MP camera. Now that the D2X is in the house I'm not sure what to do. Even Fine Jpegs are a lot bigger ar 12.x MP.

Suggestions?

Just lessen the quality?
Trim them a LOT?

Or, has Smugmug have an offering/option for people with bigger pics?

Thanks,

Tom

wellman

Tom Vervaeke wrote:

I bumped into it occasionally when sending up pics from my G6 which is a 7.1MP camera.

Hmmm... How are you saving your files? Even with high-ISO (thus noisy) quality 9 or 10 full-size JPEGs from my 8MP 20D, I top out at around 3MB file sizes. Are you trying to use TIFFs or bitmaps? I'm not even sure SM accepts those files.

If you're using JPEGs, even the 12MP D2X shouldn't scratch the 8MB filesize limit.

luke_church

Tom Vervaeke wrote:

Just lessen the quality?
Trim them a LOT?

Neither of these should be necessary. You're not using JPEG Q12's from Photoshop are you? If so, you should probably reduce this to Q10 or so. You and your customers won't be able to tell the difference, but the sizes are a lot more realistic.

Because of the way JPEG compressors work, you're frequently not actually gaining anything from the very high quality settings. For example the JPEGs from your camera are more heavily compressed than this, so if you take a file from your camera, load it in Photoshop and then save it again as a Q12 JPEG without doing anything else, you'll notice the file is a lot bigger, but Photoshop hasn't created information! All it's doing is using a very weak compression which is resulting in a lot of data being channeled into re-creating all of the subtle tweaks that your camera caused in the first place...

Incidentally, I recently printed a JPEG Q10 file at A0, with no visible compression artefacts, and I frequently throw larger than 12MP images at Smugmug, generally its all fine.

Hope this helps,

Luke

marlinspike

Sign up for a pro account and you can upload files that are 16mb each.

Tom Vervaeke

Update
Did a little playing around today.

Too a photo with my Canon G6 P&S camera. 7.1MP. File size right out of the camera: 2.894 MB.

Edited the photo in Nikon Capture 4.0. Just did a little sharpening, etc.. . File size now: 6.138 MB.

I don't have Photoshop Elements 2.0 loaded on this laptop or I would do the same experiment.

I thought Jpeg's were lossy? I.E that each time you touch them they lose just a bit more quality. If so, then why do they increase in size if you just slightly edit them?

T.

Sheaf

Tom Vervaeke wrote:

Did a little playing around today.

Too a photo with my Canon G6 P&S camera. 7.1MP. File size right out of the camera: 2.894 MB.

Edited the photo in Nikon Capture 4.0. Just did a little sharpening, etc.. . File size now: 6.138 MB.

I don't have Photoshop Elements 2.0 loaded on this laptop or I would do the same experiment.

I thought Jpeg's were lossy? I.E that each time you touch them they lose just a bit more quality. If so, then why do they increase in size if you just slightly edit them?

T.

The file size more than doubled? That's a bit odd and I suspect something else is going on. You certainly can artificially add bytes to photos through various means, but that kind of increase is surprising.

As I understand it, when you sharpen images with an automatic feature, like Unsharp Mask, it mostly just enhances the edges. It increases the edge contrast by slightly lightening the pixels on the lighter side and darkening them on the darker side.

That shouldn't cause a huge increase (proportionally speaking) in file size.

luke_church

Tom Vervaeke wrote:

Did a little playing around today.

Too a photo with my Canon G6 P&S camera. 7.1MP. File size right out of the camera: 2.894 MB.

That sounds reasonable.

Edited the photo in Nikon Capture 4.0. Just did a little sharpening, etc.. . File size now: 6.138 MB.

Hmm.... Bizzare, is there a quality option for these files? Is there any chance you can get me an original JPEG that it produces? (My email address will take files that large if you can send them, but I'm away at the moment, so I wouldn't see it until Monday. Either that or you could PM me a link to a gallery with originals enabled with one of these in)

I thought Jpeg's were lossy? I.E that each time you touch them they lose just a bit more quality.

I'm afraid it's not really that simple. That is the general idea though. You can induce a JPEG compressor to save a file at a larger size than it was loaaded at, and the file size will grow even though the information content doesn't.

Luke