Need help with image size and cropping

[jburrows500]

Hi,
I am in the process of scanning in old family pics that are on 35mm negatives strips using a Nikon Coolscan V. The scanner is creating an image size of 5959x3946 and a file size of about 5MB. I notice that most of my other images from my digital camera are more in the area of 3264x2448. I am guessing the image size from the scanner is over kill. When I export the image it balloons to 15MB at 5959x3946. When I export the image and specify a size of 3264x2448 lightroom gets close (3264x2212) and a file size of 7.25MB.

Question.. should I recrop them all to around 3264 x 22'' and have a more managable file size? Not looking to blow any of these up too large.. many are marginal in quality and are grainy to begin with.. looks like poor film camera to start with. Just looking to save them.

Also.. why is it I start with a 5mb pic then lightroom balloons it to 15mb on export? Thats seems odd. No adjustements had been made to correct color or anything?

Thank you.

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Hi,
I am in the process of scanning in old family pics that are on 35mm negatives strips using a Nikon Coolscan V. The scanner is creating an image size of 5959x3946 and a file size of about 5MB. I notice that most of my other images from my digital camera are more in the area of 3264x2448. I am guessing the image size from the scanner is over kill. When I export the image it balloons to 15MB at 5959x3946. When I export the image and specify a size of 3264x2448 lightroom gets close (3264x2212) and a file size of 7.25MB.

Question.. should I recrop them all to around 3264 x 22'' and have a more managable file size? Not looking to blow any of these up too large.. many are marginal in quality and are grainy to begin with.. looks like poor film camera to start with. Just looking to save them.

Also.. why is it I start with a 5mb pic then lightroom balloons it to 15mb on export? Thats seems odd. No adjustements had been made to correct color or anything?

Thank you.

I would presume they are jpegs? Or are you exporting as 16bit when they are 8bit to start?
The size is just a personal preference. LR will not crop to pixels, only ratios.
When you export it will keep the sides in proportion.

 

[jburrows500]

Yes, sorry, I'm referring to jpeg's. If I just export the 55''x35'' file at 1''% it will be anywhere from 15 to 2'MB. I back it down to 5'% then its only 2 to 3MB. I guess thats what I need to do. Maybe I should just knock the scanning quality down a bit to save a step.

 

[someothername]

Terminology: Cropping is when you cut out part of the picture. Resizing is when you ask your photo editor to combine pixel information and squeeze a bigger image into fewer bytes but retain all parts of the picture. In cropping you end up with less pixels displayable but still have the same amount of information about each pixel, in resizing you end up with the same number of pixels, but less information about each one.

In your situation, I'd run some experiments to see what level of scanning quality gives you the best image preservation for your purposes. Then I'd probably go through in lightroom and crop ruthlessly and cut out the parts that I don't want to save. In other words, if the picture shows my mother and father and a lot of blurry meaningless background, I'd crop out most of the background. I'd do at least a dozen or so negatives for each run, preferably ones with differing exposure levels.

Then I'd run a second set of experiments in lightroom with the export. Jpg at 8' quality, jpg at 5' quality, TIFF using zip compression and so forth. I'd examine the results of the various runs and see which one I like the best at 1''%. I would not resize at all -- I already cropped them down to the useful/interesting parts of the image that I want to save. Finally, I'd then run the export that I like best to an archive place and back those up and after I've checked to make sure it worked correctly, I'd delete the original scannings.

I have on the order of 25,''' negatives my father left me from his 3' years of business travel around the world, plus another 5,''' or so of my own pre-digital work so I'm looking at something similar myself.

Digital file space is cheap, and I'd rather have a good quality archived image file than one that looks lousy at 1''% when I know it looked pretty good before I archived it.

my 2 cents