Help with X2 RAW Photos being resized

[sm_studios]

Hi, I am in desperate need of some assistance. I have the paint shop pro x2 and I didn't realize before that when I converted my raw images over to jpeg it took the size down from 8MP to 1MP and my clients want wall photos. Help anyone? I need it ASAP! I need to know how to maintain the large file size. I only have a couple days to finish these images. Thank you soo much!

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums,

First I split your post off into it's own topic since it's concerning a resizing problem.

What is the resolution of the jpeg images that your RAW images are being converted to? In order to retain as much detail as possible you will need to have the jpeg resolutions quite large. How are you coming up with your jpeg image being only 1MP? What is the RAW file format you're using, and what camera was used to take them?

Finally if your camera came with its own RAW conversion program, we strongly urge you to use that. PSP's raw image conversion stinks on ice. Also I would not save my images to be used for printing to jpeg as it's a lossy format. I convert my RAW images to TIFF.

[sm_studios]

Thank you for the welcome! I was pretty frustrated when I first posted. I kinda didn't care where it went, I just needed some help! Just to post a question I had to fill out this long survey, which didn't help my nerves. lol I'm a bit new when it comes to all this digital stuff. All I know is, when I shoot my pix, I shoot (Cannon 30D) in raw and they're around 8 or more MB. I've only ever known jpeg, I haven't come across (or perhaps learned) any other way of saving a file. I did senior portraits for a prominent family and they printed wall photos and they looked horrible! Now I'm in the process of editing yesterday's engagement photos and I just happened to look at the properties and the photo went from 8mb down to 1 and some are 2. I don't know anything about "tiff" files but all I need to do is make sure they save as big as possible to the flash drive so they can have them printed anywhere. I did find however that saving them in PNG helped keep them quite large. I text a colleague of mine about it but she has yet to respond. So should I just convert them to tiff or is PNG ok? I appreciate your help!

P.S. How large does a file need to be to produce a great quality wall photo?

[Ron P.]

You can use either one of them. The smaller file size from RAW to JPEG or any other compressed format is due to just that, they are being compressed. RAW format photos, are uncompressed so they will be quite large. My RAW (*.KDC from a Kodak easyshare), are around 13MB each. Saving the same resolution to a JPEG file will result in a file size of around 2.5MB.

[LeviFiction]

It should be noted that you need to check how much compression is being added the JPEG files.

When you are in the SaveAs Dialog to choose "JPEG" there is a small button that says "Options" at the bottom of that save dialog. Click it and another dialog will pop up. You can see an option for compression settings with a slider on it. A lower compression will result in the best possible result with a larger file size and higher compression will result in horrible ugly files but very small ones.

Now, like Ron said because it is a compressed format it'll always be smaller than RAW. However, that's not the part that concerns most photographers. JPEG is also what is known as a lossy format. In other words the computer will throw away information (pixels of similar color, colors it doesn't believe you'll notice are gone, etc.) so part of the file-size difference is because there is actually less to save and then it's compressed on top of that.

PNG and TIFF are known as Losseless formats. These formats will result in larger files than JPEG because they aren't throwing anything away but they can be compressed so you can still get smaller file sizes without the loss in quality. So either one should be fine. TIFF by default, I believe, uses a very common compression known as LZW so it should appear smaller. If I'm wrong then TIFF defaults to uncompressed and you should maintain a large file size. You can change between compressed and uncompressed, again, through the "Options" button in the SaveAs dialog.

[sm_studios]

Thank you so very much!! You've both been very helpful!!!