Giant file size from Lightroom

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kaitlyn2004

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When I use "Edit In Photoshop" and save the file, I end up having turned my 19.2MB RAW file into a 86.1MB TIF file.

Clearly undesirable because I'll run out of disk space in no time!

What steps can I take to reduce that filesize without (major?) loss of quality?
 
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The RAW CR2 file is 12 or 14 bits of color per pixel and it is compressed. The TIFF file is 16 bits of color and uncompressed. You can choose a compression method in the 'Edit in' Dialog or you can crop the image before you choose 'Edit in' or do both.
In a test (just for you), Zip compression reduced the size to about 85-9'% of the uncompressed TIFF. A crop to ~11% of the original reduced the size is ~ 12% when compressed and 16% uncompressed.
I find that I am able to let LR do about 9'% of my images and I only have to resort to pixel editing ofr a very small number of images (mostly to improve the noise management).

BTW, How many pixels are in your camera? My 14.6 Mp camera produces 23,''' KB DNG images and 83,''' KB uncompressed TIFF out of LR. I savagely cull images since I get a DNG and a JPEG out of my camera. But still I think I can manage with less that a TB auxillary storage for some time to come I'm only up to about 25'GB with 23''' images and many of those need paring from the tree.
 
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You can of course use 8 bit TIFFs also which will make for much smaller files.
 
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Hmm, in my "Edit In" preferences, I have:

- TIFF
- ProPhoto
- 16 bit
- 24' dpi
- ZIP

so, it should be ZIP compression? You guys are saying an uncompressed tiff should be ~9'mb... am I missing something?
 
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[quote author=kaitlyn2''4 link=topic=8962.msg6'333#msg6'333 date=12639'3589]
Hmm, in my "Edit In" preferences, I have:

- TIFF
- ProPhoto
- 16 bit
- 24' dpi
- ZIP

so, it should be ZIP compression? You guys are saying an uncompressed tiff should be ~9'mb... am I missing something?
[/quote]My 14.6mp DNG are ~23KB. An uncompressed TIFF file created from this using the "Edit In " preferences is ~83KB. When I repeated the TIF creation using ZIP compression, the size of the TIFF file was 71KB. Do note that the difference between an 83KB file and an 83MB file is a factor of 1'''. Unless you work with KB, MB, GB & TB regularly, it can be confusing. An ~9'KB file is not so large that you should worry too much about storage space. If you think you need to post process everthing in PS that you catalog in LR, you probably need to revisit your workflow practices.
 
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Sorry, but I thik you are confused :)

There is absolutely NO WAY your 14MP DNG files are ~23KB. I ASSURE you they are more likely ~23MB :)
 
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[quote author=kaitlyn2''4 link=topic=8962.msg6'346#msg6'346 date=12639131'4]
Sorry, but I thik you are confused :)

There is absolutely NO WAY your 14MP DNG files are ~23KB. I ASSURE you they are more likely ~23MB :)
[/quote]Yes, my turn to be chagrinned :-[ Still Not a large file by my standards.
 
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Ok, I'm going to go a completely different direction on this, and you can make your own mind up...

When you've finished editing, are you likely to do anything else to that file? Are you going to go back to it numerous times and do more retouching? Are you particularly wanting to keep the layers?

The reason I ask is not every image is going to be a masterpiece. You won't necessarily want a huge TIFF file for every image. For images that you don't the layers, and you don't need to re-edit loads of times, a top quality jpeg could do the job just as well, and take a minimal amount of space.
 
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Just to get the math clear on this subject:

A 16 MegaPixel RAW Image only contains only one channel per pixel, with 14 bits per pixel, and therefore occupies 28'''''''' Bytes (at 8 Bit), which is 26.7MB:

16'''''''' * 14 / 8 / 1'24 / 1'24 = 26.7MB

With a little compression, for my camera, it gets down to around 2'MB.


When building a 16 Bit TIFF file from it, each of the pixels contains all 3 channels, so 1 Pixel occupies 6 Bytes or 48 Bits:

16'''''''' * 48 / 8 / 1'24 / 1'24 = 91.5MB

Again, with compression you can get this number down somewhat.

Beat
 
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