Image size for quality prints

[beansprout23]

Hi all!
We had professional photos done a few years back, and I blew them up (20x24) to hang on my walls, no problem. They were about 2-3MB each, and look beautiful!
Fast forward to now I’m dabbling a bit in portrait photography, and I shoot rawNEF and export from Lightroom as JPEG at 100% quality and my file sizes are massive! Between 13MB-30MB at times. My friends and family have a hard time ordering prints/cards online as they’re told the file sizes need to be compressed.
Am I doing something wrong? I don’t know what I don’t know. I compressed one for a friend’s Christmas card and it printed like junk. I’m shooting another friend’s wedding next week and I am concerned.

I use a Nikon D3500 with a Sigma 20mm.

Thanks in advance!

 

[dunfly]

When you export, reduce the quality to around 80%. This should reduce you file size to a useable level and still provide good prints.

 

[Strodav]

Your experience is a bit different from mine and I'm not understanding why. I have a D7200 at 24mp (6000 x 4000), similar to your D3500, and I shoot raw and export jpgs from LrC at quality of 100. My unprocessed nef lossless compressed files are just under 24mb and high quality jpg exports can be anywhere from 3 1/2 mb to 22 mb depending on the image. Sending files can be tricky. Email can resize your images, but usually makes them smaller. AOL is notorious for this, even though their advertised total Email size is 25mb, they will downsize jpg attachments. Gmail has a limit of 25mb as well, but doesn't resize your attached files, even if jpg.

Many of the print services (I like mpix.com) allow you to download very large files when using their website. I've downloaded 20+mb jpgs many times.

 

[Peeb]

13-30 MB files don't actually sound too massive to me.

The size of the prints will, of course, drive the needed resolution for 'sharp' prints. It varies. Viewing distance makes a difference too. Billboards look tack sharp from the highway, but up close, they are very 'jaggy'. Work with your photo processor to get them the file size and type that they need to get the optimal print you want. They almost always will be quite specific as to what they want (jpg vs tiff, color space, resolution, etc).

Also, get a clear understanding with the printer as to whether or not you want them to make any adjustments. For example, they often increase the exposure by about 1/3 of a stop, to account for the difference in 'brightness' when an image is not backlit on a computer screen, but instead sitting on an unlit piece of photo paper or canvas.

 

[Don Fischer]

13-30 MB files don't actually sount to massive to me.

The size of the prints will, of course, drive the needed resolution for 'sharp' prints. It varies. Viewing distance makes a difference too. Billboards look tack sharp from the highway, but up close, they are very 'jaggy'. Work with your photo processor to get them the file size and type that they need to get the optimal print you want. They almost always will be quite specific as to what they want (jpg vs tiff, color space, resolution, etc).

Also, get a clear understanding with the printer as to whether or not you want them to make any adjustments. For example, they often increase the exposure by about 1/3 of a stop, to account for the difference in 'brightness' when an image is not backlit on a computer screen, but instead sitting on an unlit piece of photo paper or canvas.

Have you tried printing your big files? What do you think of them? I think the best way to find out if your alright or not is do it and see what you get. It will only cost a sheet of paper and then you'll know where your at.

 

[Peeb]

Have you tried printing your big files? What do you think of them? I think the best way to find out if your alright or not is do it and see what you get. It will only cost a sheet of paper and then you'll know where your at.

I used Topaz Gigapixel AI to up-size a 24 megapixel file up to 9,000x6,000 pixels, and printed to a width of 55 inches to hang over the fireplace. It's glorious.

 

[Don Fischer]

The longer I do photography the more I think to shoot really good photo's you need four collage majors in it. I Been reading about raw and I haven't a clue what they are talking about. Near as I can tell raw exists show you can change the scene you took the photo of to make something different than what you actually saw.

 

[21limited]

Talk to your printer, find out what the maximum file size they accept is and use that. You should be able to get down to around 3 MB, without loss of IQ. Recently I’ve had banding issues with highly compressed jpegs, but, I’ve never had a problem printng a 2-3 Mb jpeg.

"Near as I can tell raw exists show you can change the scene you took the photo of to make something different than what you actually saw."
It’s rare that what comes off the camera is what I saw. Raw gives me the possibility to create an image, that emphaiszes the features that caught my attention
I don’t try and recreated what I saw, I want the image to recreate what I felt.

As for the dpi neeed. Even as low as 120 dpi will work. I’ve printed a 24 MB file to 42x33, and it turned out very good. It hangs on my wall now.

I

 

[smoke665]

Zombie Alert

 

[Peeb]

Zombie Alert

Lol! Yes, @beansprout23 has moved on, but the rest of us are having a marvelous time.

 

[smoke665]

but the rest of us are having a marvelous time

You been napping since 2023?

 

[Don Fischer]

I do my printing with a program called Pixma. Once you have the picture where you want it there's a print button. That brings up a deal called review that tells me if the print will be any good or no. Measure's everything in pixels though. Seems to me it does a good job. get's down low enough in pixels and it says "bad quality". I don't get along with the computer world to well but am able to deal with this Pixma program. I don't send any digital photo's out to print.

 

[greybeard]

Where are they uploading these file to? 13 - 30mb is not all that big.

 

[MontanaDave]

At 300 dpi, an 8X10 print would be 300*8 by 300*10 or 2400 by 3000 pixels = approx 7.2 mb

 

[21limited]

At 300 dpi, an 8X10 print would be 300*8 by 300*10 or 2400 by 3000 pixels = approx 7.2 mb

My friends and family have a hard time ordering prints/cards online as they’re told the file sizes need to be compressed.
Am I doing something wrong?

My 3480x2160 images on flickr are all reduced to 1 MB. Compression is a wonderful thing.
A compressed jpeg is just as good as a raw and contains an accurate representation of the larger file. If you try and alter the image, say brighten some shadows of reduce some highlights, youu need to work on the raw file. But once you have it the way you want it, there is no disadvantage to a jpeg. A 2-3 MB file is just as good as a 200 MB 16 bit tiff. Especially since printers are 8 bit and can’t even make use of much of the range in a raw photo. By reducing in size in jpeg, the printer wont have to guess how to interpret your image. There is absolutely no point in sending a 12 bit image to an 8 bit device. No matter what you do the image will be 8 bit.

In a long discussion with a professional printer some years ago, he claimed 600 DPI was noticeably better than 300 DPI. But for some reason he couldn;t tell me where I could get a 600 DPI print made, so his research was not reproducible.

Bottom line… you can only actually see 300 DPI from about 8 inches away with normal eyesight. At a normal viewing distance, from which you can actually see the composition and artistic values, I find 120 DPI for canvas an 144 DPI for glossy is quite acceptable, although I always go for the highest value possible, why not? It costs me nothing, but I’ve even had 72 DPI come out OK with older low res photos printed to 4x6.

As with anything, you will have purists argue “I can see a difference.” And maybe they can. Just ask them what they think of the composition an they’ll look at you like you are crackers.

One of the most expensive paintings of all time Cezanne's “The card players” is worth way more than any photograph, is very low res. You can’t even read the markings on the cards… outrageous eh?

The Card Players, 1890 - 1892 - Paul Cezanne - WikiArt.org

‘The Card Players’ was created in 1892 by Paul Cezanne in Post-Impressionism style. Find more prominent pieces of genre painting at Wikiart.org – best visual art database.

www.wikiart.org

Very few images need super high resolution to be amazing. I usuallly ask the printer what the highest resolution his printer will make use of and size my images according to that. Usually 300 DPI or 360 DPI. But I’ll go as low as 120 DPI, if my original image is lower than the resolution required to print at 300 DPI.

The human eye has trouble with detail more less than 1/100 inch. YOu porbalby won’t even see all the detail in a 1/100 image. or 100 DPI.