Rawtherapee portrait preset4/14/2024 The blue line shows file size, while the red lines shows perceived quality. The takeaway is simple: quality settings and file sizes don’t follow the same trend. It’s not completely accurate, because they use different scales, but it is helpful for seeing just how much the 2 lines diverge: And if we look at the chart of file sizes again, it is clear that we can save close to 6MB, which is well over a 50% savings in filesize compared to a JPG quality of 100! Below is a rather unscientific overlay of the 2 graphs. Keeping in mind that this is my opinion (and yours may differ), you can see on the above chart that you could easily get away with a JPG Quality setting of 80 in Lightroom with hardly any noticeable loss in quality. I’ll forgive you for concluding that the visually perceived quality of the image would follow a fairly similar looking line, but in my (admittedly subjective) opinion, that is not actually the case! Take a look at this graph: Secondly, notice the huge drop-off in filesize between 95 and 90, and again between 85 and 80 the filesize nearly halves from 10.3MB to 6MB, and then nearly halves again from 6MB to 3.7MB! It immediately becomes obvious that we have a few anomalies!įirst, notice the plateaus where the filesize doesn’t change. I just plugged in the numbers to get a little chart here to show what happens! James helpfully provided me with a set of sample files (of the above image from a recent photoshoot) exported at different quality settings. So, the purpose of this blog post is to give you some data to work with so that you can decide for yourself whether 100 actually means “highest quality” or whether you can still get a visually perceived “highest quality” export with a much lower Quality number that will save you an exceptional amount of hard drive space. Very large! And I used to do this until I ran some experiments and realized that it was just a waste of hard drive space! However, the exported JPG will approach the size of the original RAW file. This will definitely provide the highest quality export. Some photographers just set the quality slider to 100. The Quality setting takes care of all of that in Lightroom.īut the question remains, what Quality number should be used? But thankfully, you don’t have to know about all of those things to get a good-looking JPG file from Lightroom. Some other programs provide a much more daunting array of options, like Photometrics, Color Subsampling, Smoothing, Huffman tables, Progressive JPGs, etc. Lightroom actually takes care of many complicated JPG compression options for you. The question I’d like to address is this: when exporting/saving my photos in JPG format, what Quality settings should I use? Here’s the dialog that you’ll see when exporting a JPG file in Lightroom: In 2013 I got my first DSLR that could take photos in RAW format, so the amount of new photos taking up space in my library started growing exponentially after that!īut we’re not here to discuss RAW format or my personal photo library. However, the downside to high quality is high file size! In the 10 years since I started taking photos I’ve amassed quite a large library! Here’s a quick graph showing the amount of space new photos were taking up in my library each year. I’d venture to say that all of the photographers here at Lenspiration are shooting for the best, so they naturally want their photos to be the “highest quality” possible. The topic of image quality (specifically JPG format image quality) comes up every so often in photography circles, and Lenspiration is no exception (see this discussion about photo formats and quality, as well as the more recent discussion about delivering photos to clients and the relevant Lightroom quality settings).
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