I am using CS5 and I noticed that if I open a raw file (ARW, NEF, DNG, etcc..) in 16-bit in camera raw and then use the Save As function in CS5 I never see the file size. If I use 8-bit and follow the same procedure I see the file size using the Save As function. It does not matter whether I save it using high quality or maximum. Am I missing something?
Photoshop will only show you the file size for jpegs (AFAIK) and only in 8 bit then. If that's important for you, downsample to 8 bit prior to your Save As.
treebeard wrote:
I am using CS5 and I noticed that if I open a raw file (ARW, NEF, DNG, etcc..) in 16-bit in camera raw and then use the Save As function in CS5 I never see the file size. If I use 8-bit and follow the same procedure I see the file size using the Save As function. It does not matter whether I save it using high quality or maximum. Am I missing something?
it can show you the file size regardless what file format it's in.
Not during the Save or Save As process, which is what the original poster was asking about, and if you're saving jpegs, the Document Sizes option will only give you the opened flattened file size, not the saved size on disk or how big your file might if you happen to be working with layers.
Peter Figen wrote:
Not during the Save or Save As process, which is what the original poster was asking about, and if you're saving jpegs, the Document Sizes option will only give you the opened flattened file size, not the saved size on disk or how big your file might if you happen to be working with layers.
I don't work with layers for this particular workflow. The reason it's important to me is that the images I am working on will be published every two months in a high quality magazine. I want to crop the images and then edit them but not resize them. I just like to see the file size during the Save As process so I can keep the image around 3-4mb. Is there really any advantage then to working in 14-bit?
The advantage of working in higher than 8 bit is that even if you're going to save off an 8 bit file eventually, that all of your adjustments, whatever they are, are done in a less destructive bit depth. More important for your workflow than absolute megabytes is the jpeg compression level you choose and whether that has a visible effect on the image. As long as there is no additional work being done to the image at the publication, any reasonable compression level is going to be fine, but if they're going to twist and tweak, then things like blue skies can fall apart pretty fast. Conversions to CMYK can be pretty rough on jpegs as well. Much harsher than a typical inkjet RGB conversion.
I don't know the nature of your work, but is there any reason to save a lossless version as a tiff for archiving or are these pretty much one time use images that will never see the light of day in the future?
The number of images could be a factor too, but I usually prefer to send zip compressed tiffs whenever possible, and with increasingly faster internet connections, the file size is less of a problem than ever before.
I see your point. The images will most likely not get used again by me or the magazine. As far as I know they really don't do much to them. I do the editing and cropping and that's it. I usually use LR 4.2 but lately I have been using CS5 more and more as I have developed a pretty simple workflow that is not too time consuming. Thanks for the info.
"Save for Web" will give you an estimate of Jpeg file size, even when your working image is 16-bit. In fact, in CS6 when you do a "Save as" under these conditions, PS shows a note recommending you use "Save for Web" if you want to see the Jpeg file size for a 16-bit working image.
"Save for Web" sometimes squawks if you have a large image but in my experience it usually works anyway.
If it were me sending jpegs to a "high quality" magazine, I would be more concerned about the high quality aspects of the image rather than the exact file size. I would tend to lean on being consistent in the jpeg quality/compression setting rather than shoot for a specific file size range. If it were me, and was sending jpegs, I would just save them as a number eight and let the file size fall where it may. The actual size is dependent on the image content, so it can vary widely.
