Weird scanned negative file size issue

earthmanbuck

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My usual process is: shoot film, have it developed, scan it myself and edit if necessary, have prints made once I have enough good shots from several rolls.

I was just trying to do one of these big batch orders and noticed something kind of weird: three of the files were substantially larger than the others, too large for me to even upload on my local lab's online ordering system (76 MB vs the regular ~2 MB). What's strange is that these files are the same format as all the others (jpeg), same rough dimensions (~4400 x 2800 pixels), same resolution (3200 ppi), and I would have scanned them at the exact same time and by the same process as all the others.

Does anyone know what happened here, and how I can get that file size down without drastically slashing the quality?
 
They may have been scanned as .tifs (I usually do), but the versions I am trying to upload have all been converted to .jpg.
 
Did you by chance save those files at 16-bit instead of 8-bit?
 
Well that was weird...I made a duplicate of each of the files, and when I saved them, the default was set to TIFF, 16-bits. I just changed to jpeg, 8 bits, and that got me to the size they should be. Don't really understand what the issue was (unless they were tiff files all along, despite a .jpg extension), but at any rate it's solved. Thanks everyone.
 
Speaking as a totally non-technical ignoramus, I have come across this before.
Sometimes a software product will save an image file without the expected end of file (eof) marker and from then on, the operating system seems to calculate a much larger expected size, perhaps it is rounding up to the largest allowable segment size on the disk.
When the file is opened by a more robust program and resaved with a different name, the program will save the file when the information runs out and with the correct eof marker.

To me it is a fix like rebooting when the OS is misbehaving.
I just give it another chance to be good.
 

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