File Size/Exporting Photos

[RJKs Daughter]

I am trying to figure out the most efficient way to process & store my photos, without taking up a gigantic amount of space on my hard drives. What file size/specs would you recommend when exporting from Lightroom and saving from Photoshop (while retaining good quality). The majority of my clients print 8x10's and sometimes a few sizes larger.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[RecurrentNerve]

Always a tricky one. TIFF is a good lossless format that can preserve layers. It's generally not a great deal smaller than PSD though. Anything else (i.e. JPEG) is lossy and so not good.

You could get yourself one or two 2Tb (2000Gb) external hard drives and not worry about it - they're around $100-120.

[teaking]

The best thing thing to do is keep the original full resolution of the image which will enable different crops and the largest available print sizes.

As for file size you would have to look at which file type you would like to save in, there are numerous boxes to tick and lots of views on the subject. I personaly think that JPEG offers great file sizes and still enables you to make the majority of edits. Some people will disagree and there isnt a right answer to be honest.

[RJKs Daughter]

Thank you for the quick feedback!

Do you have any thoughts on the quality guage in Lightroom? When I export images, typically I select JPEG for the format & keep the "Quality" at 100. I noticed this was producing rather large file sizes. Is there a range under quality that preserves the detail of the image without producing such a large file size?

[Photologyst]

If you want to print these files in larger formats you need to save at 300 ppi.

JPG is lossy. I save in DNG, TIFF, JPG (for websites and emails), and Photoshop with layers, if applicable.

External drives are cheap! Purchase at least a terabyte drive and forget about saving room. Save your photos, instead.

[teaking]

I havent used light room so i dont know how it works but why would you export at 300ppi and not just at the full resolution. For example if it was 100 x 100 you would save it full resolution being 100 x 100 ppi doesnt come in to effect untill an image is printed at a certain size. Other wise your either adding or subracting pixels or setting a default print size ?

My appologies like i say i havent used lightroom so would be interesting to hear how it works