Digital BW, The Print

> From: daniel [mailto:dnj@...]
>
> like many of you, i suspect, i store the photos i've worked on in
> photoshop format so i can
> retain layers, etc, and readjust them easily later. but this
> creates huge files. the worst
> discrepancy is for a jpeg that was taken as jpeg and not raw; the
> file often grows to 30MB
> or more for a 6MP image.
>
> my intuition -- and i'll admit i haven't checked the numbers --
> is that this is much more
> space than should be needed, even ignoring the effect of jpeg
> compression. hence my
> question: are there some tricks people use to reduce the file
> size? yes, i know storage is
> cheap, but using lots of unnecessary space has its costs (eg, in
> time spent backing up).
>
> obviously, i don't want to lose information by reducing
> resolution. but i'm assuming that
> much of the growth is because photoshop is caching information
> that can be deleted. for
> example, if i have all my work in layers, i'm usually happy to
> clear the history, and
> presumably a long history takes a lot of space. are there other
> things like this?
>
> i wonder whether maybe photoshop itself is not well designed in
> this regard? a curves
> layer, for example, shouldn't require more space to store than
> the amount of data entered
> when you design the curve -- a few bytes for a couple of points
> -- as it should be able to
> recompute the effect of the curve from its specification. it
> seems not to do this, however.

If it's disk space you're worried about, just compress the files--they
should be highly compressible. In Windows, on an NTFS file system, you can
just set the compressed property of the file (under the Advanced button), or
of the folder that contains them.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...