A very good Wednesday to you all. 

I hope you are all starting to enjoy the beautiful Spring weather in your area. (If you had it for a while then fantastic. We are just starting to get some great weather here in New England.)

Today I want to discuss something that is often neglected and can be very frustrating for your Professor’s and classmates alike. That is, NOT reducing the size of your PDF files. When you upload your photographs for review it can become quite large and especially if you start adding additional files you land up having files in excess of 100MB.

For those students that have slower internet speeds, this just means we don’t download and critique your work. We just do not have the time to sit around and wait for large files to download. So how can you reduce the files, but at the same time make sure you have great detail and clarity in all your photographs?

Well it is very simple. Export your 300ppi, yes I know they sometimes want 150ppi or 72ppi because of the size, but to get around poor resolution export everything at 300ppi. (To do this in Lightroom I will discuss this in a later blog.) Once you have exported your contact sheets or final images for review you will then combine them into a PDF using Acrobat Pro version. The other versions do not have this option. There is a newer version for Acrobat on the market and because I am using Adobe Creative Cloud, that is the version I will discuss here.The principle and method is exactly the same for all the other versions as well.

In the following example I combined a contact sheet and nine images that I needed for my Creative Concepts course. I landed up with 15 files in the document which included my creative proposal, 9 final photographs for review and my contact sheets.  The final PDF size was just over 75MB.

I uploaded full resolution files for the detail and I had a 6 page Word document as well as my 4 contact sheets included. As you can see that is a very large file. So how do we reduce this file size. It is very simple. Under the tools menu in Acrobat, the location has changed for Acrobat CC, it is located on the left in Acrobat CC and on the right hand side in all the other versions. Click on the tools menu and select OPTIMIZE PDF.

Once you do this you then select the reduce file option on the menu bar.

In older version it says reduce file size in the right hand column. Click on the Reduce File Size option. Follow the instructions for saving and renaming your file. Acrobat will process all your photographs and files and make it easier for viewing on a computer screen.

If you check your file properties now you can see the change in file size. I have managed to reduce my file from 75MB down to 4.14MB

This makes it so much easier to upload to the class discussion area and I can vouch for it, your classmates will really appreciate the smaller file size.

I hope you found this tutorial useful. It makes such a difference when you are working late and that deadline is looming. Everybody appreciates it and you do not lose any detail from your photographs.

I am always willing to help so if you need additional help please send me an email or leave a message on the site blog. Where are here to help you.

If you have any suggestions for things you would like to see on the blog then also drop us a note and we will see about putting it into the roster of topics to discuss. As always I look forward to hearing from you and wish you all a great week with your assignments.

Denzil

Wednesday Ambassador.

The RAW versus JPEG Showdown

Since the beginning of Digital Photography there has been an ongoing argument on which is better RAW or JPEG and it can at times become a heated discussion. I am going to try and explain the differences between the two and the pros and cons of each one.

JPEGs are compressed photos, which means your camera looks at all the information it captures via the sensor and only saves the data it deems important and that’s what you get in your finished image file.
What does JPEG stand for? Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is the committee that created the file format. Sometimes you will see this file format abbreviated as JPG.

With JPEG, the file is in it’s modified state so there is not need to process anything. Once you download the file to your hard drive it is ready to open for viewing. The camera also tend to make automatic adjustments, such as color enhancements, saturation, exposure and so on. This format is the standard across all brands of cameras so the images are ready to view and print with no extra work. Because JPEG files are compressed they also tend to take up a lot less disk space than a RAW file, so a JPEG image file might only take up 2MB, where the same file in RAW format might be 10MB or larger. JPEG files, since they are so much smaller they can easily be emailed or uploaded to Social Media sites such as Flickr or Facebook, etc.

                                My puppy Gizmo, shot in RAW format and post processed by me.

The RAW file format doesn’t stand for anything, all it tells you is that the files are unprocessed and exactly as the camera sees the image from the sensor, just like the way your eye sees the scene. If the camera collects 10MB of data, then the file is exactly 10MB in size. What this means is that you can print the image in considerably larger formats that you can with JPEG files. When shooting in RAW, you maybe need more memory cards when out on a shoot so that you don’t run out of storage capacity during your shoot and you will most likely need an extra, external hard drive to store your images on and to process them from.

A RAW file is in it’s all natural form and as a result, the file needs to be processed by you using special software and this gives you full control over the colors, vibrance, saturation, exposure and so on. RAW files cannot be opened by anything like a JPEG can be and they cannot be easily emailed or uploaded as website don’t know how to render RAW files and mail servers will not allow those extremely large files to be sent in this format.

So now that you have all this information, which file format is the winner? Well, there is no clear winner, just as which system you choose to shoot with, Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fuji, etc it is more what your personal style and preference is.

I suggest using RAW if you plan to do a lot of post processing and want full control over the finished product. If file size is not a major concern and you intend to print at sizes exceeding 20 inches by 30 inches.
I suggest using JPEG if you are concerned about file size and space on your memory cards and hard drives. If you need to take a lot of photos in quick succession, such as shooting a sports event, then JPEG will allow you to shoot more images faster before filling up your cameras buffer. Also choose JPEG if you plan to do minimal post processing and you want to share large sets of photos by email or upload them right to the internet without converting or resizing them.

I personally prefer to shoot in RAW as I get the most information in my images from the camera’s sensor and I prefer to do my own post processing as the camera’s built in processing isn't always the most accurate. I also since I am an I.T. profession for my day job, I always have many Terabytes of storage and I also tend to buy the larges memory cards my cameras can use. For my new Canon EOS 6D, I am using a 128GB SD card. Now that we’ve covered the subject of RAW vs JPEG, get out there and make some great images.

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