Image Size

It is a problem. Best you can do is save at a 11 or 10 or you'll have to crop down a bit. I find 10,000px is the limit and saved at a level 10 and it seems to be fine. Not all images will be huge. If there is a star field, a ton of flowers, lots of detail, non compressible things, they would have a hard time saving it. But if it has a lot of blue sky, basic details, etc, then you can compress it quite a bit and it would be smaller. Also if its really noisy, it will have a hard time compressing. But if its noisy it wouldn't print anyway.


----Mike Savad

Thanks Mike. Generally, there is a lot of detail and I have had to go down to 9 or even 8 to stay under 25 MB. Sometimes the difference between 10 and 9 is 6 or 7 MB so the file size will drop from 26 or 27 MB down to 20 or lower so it makes you feel like you are losing a lot of quality.

You can save it as 28mb, and the system should see it as 27 and it will still usually go. So that might help a bit. Otherwise you may have to shrink it a bit. I've asked for more headway since I got here.


----Mike Savad

Retired a couple of years ago from the Graphics industry after nearly 40 years. Was dealing with thousands of images for printing well before anything digital and thousands more over the years since then.

We never used pixels to measure anything that was going to get printed. Strictly inches except for the printing resolution, which was pretty much always 300 pixels/inch (ppi).

So, on my own photography, I have no clue what the megapixels are of my cameras. I save all images with the longest side being 20 inches and letting the shorter side be determined automatically by Photoshop. Photoshop does a great job of doing whatever it has to do to make a nice sharp image at that size.
The resolution is always set at 300 pixels/inch (ppi).
I've noticed in the discussions on this board about this topic over the years that nobody ever mentions the printing resolution.
To me, that's just as critical as anything you do to the image size.

Everything is saved as .jpg with the sRGB profile embedded in it. Quality is always 12. Format Option is always Baseline ("Standard"). These are all Photoshop terms and that's all I've used with images since it came out around 1989. I have no clue what other image software does.

All of this always results in a file size somewhere under 25 MB.

I also know that with the images like I save them, if printing to a really good printer (which I assume FAA is doing), I can go pretty big with the print size with no real visible loss of quality.

Maybe Abbie has an opinion on that since I'm assuming she knows FAAs printing capabilities.

You probably saw that I save .jpgs with the sRGB profile rather than Adobe RGB. I've included a link to an article by photographer Ken Rockwell that he wrote back in 2006. I came across it a couple of years later. I've been doing this print stuff for awhile I guess.

https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/adobe-rgb.htm

Hope this helps. I'm sure I missed some details maybe, but everything I do is instinct at this point since I've done it so much. I don't really give it any thought any more while I'm working on my photo's. I guess that's a good thing.

This comes up at least once a month and it always starts and finishers the same way.

I have been in the printing and publishing business for over 50 years, but I have never been a "printer" per se...

I have worked with printers at some of the best publishing houses in the country, including Disney, Norman Rockwell, the lead printer at the Smithsonian, and others.

I do what they tell me. So when I got to FAA ten years ago, I started doing what they told me. I trusted what they told me because I saw they head over 500,000 members, including large companies like Conde Nest, Sports Illustrated, and dozens of others that owned their own publishing houses and employed top printers.

If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me. 10 years later, several thousand sales, and now there are over a million FAA members and even more large companies that own publishing/printing houses.

If this 25-meg thing was a big problem... FAA would have been out of business by now.

This comes up all the time, and it is the same answer... nothing is going to change in the near future.

How? Just drop the quality till it fits and sometimes cut the pixel dimensions if they are larger than FAA will print.

This stitched pano was aroind a gig and made it down to the FAA size. Giant 84 inch prints look amazing.

https://adamjewell.com/featured/peyto-lake-winter-paradise-adam-jewell.html

They might not sell for $20,000 in an Aspen or Jackson Hole gallery but that customer isn’t buying from POD sites.

The largest I have seen of my images are 24x36s, which are fantastic. The largest I have seen from FAA is a 60 inch metal hanging in a gallery in Morro Bay. It was by an FAA member. It, too, looked fantastic.

We do not use dpi or ppi here so stop worrying about it and do not change it to 300 or try and set specific widths in inches.

The new printers here use pixel size to determine the size an image will print. If you upload a good quality 6000 pixel image it will print at 60 inches wide. It is different to printing in magazines etc. These machines can produce amazing images at 100 ppi.

This is the information about pixel size and dimensions.

https://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=5251790

Ken,
Digital files have no inches. How could they? But assuming 20 inches and 300 ppi, then you do a little math and get 6,000 pixels. This will make a 60 inch print. You do not have to have 300 pixels for every inch of print. But it is nice.

Depending on the camera resolution you may be discarding pixels when you save. Or you may be upsizing. That is not a good workflow.

Printing resolution is discussed here all the time. But the sizes of the prints are determined by the pixel count. Printer output is not at all the same as printer input. The printers are set at 300 DPI but if you only have 100 then the file will be interpolated up to 300. If you have more than 300 PPI as an input the printer will just discard pixels. The idea that you need 300 PPI (DPI) for printing is dated. You really don't need that for modern inkjet prints. The actual droplets are far more then 300 per inch. Have you done an actual test. I did that 20 years ago. You can't tell. Most are very happy with the prints here.

If you are saving at 6,000 pixels you will have the option to price up to 60 inches. If you only want to sell 20 inch prints, that is your option.
What ever you do , don't force and up size. Be cognizant of the original pixel dimensions. Using your method one can force an upsize. Don't do that here. Only downsize.
The printers here ignore any DPI settings and they are actually a separate file not integral to the image file. They are not instructions to the printer. Those numbers are for you convenience. Setting limits on both DPI and inches at the same time can cause a needles change in pixel dimensions. With due respect to your experience, what you need to do here is not the same as what you used to do.

Thanks for all the replies! I'm sure this topic comes up way too often and you were very kind to take the time to answer. I did upload some files last night and will probably get a test print or two to make sure i'm not messing anything up.

Thanks again!

Jeff, start by uploading one file, the system will configure how large it can print, if that works for you, continue with the rest

I think the 25 MB limit is pretty much outdated and reducing the image size is annoying additional work I have to do just to upload here on FAA.