Export problems

cbay

Senior Member
So i'm trying to get some prints made. I thought i had it ready, but looking at the file sizes i started to get concerned. I exported from lightroom at 100% as jpegs. I thought that was correct? They range from 4 - 18 mb in size. But,,,, there are a few that are 1.9 mb and they were photos that were originally converted to tiff in nikon and then edited in lightroom. The original tiffs in viewnx show them as 137 mb, they show that in lightroom as well. But when i export they are 1.9 mb. Now i figure the ones from 4-18 mb in size that were nef files originally are due to cropping and amount of detail in the photos??
But the tiffs converted to jpegs is a problem. I had the individual at Nations review the small ones and they did say they were close to their minimum for print in terms of resolution. Being wet behind the ears i didn't save the original nef's when i converted to tiff on the photos in question.
What's going on here?? I would greatly appreciate some assistance with this situation. Never had digital prints made before and it's a little frustrating.
Thanks in advance,
Chris
 

J-see

Senior Member
You're converting an uncompressed 16bit Tiff (100+Mb is about normal) to a 8bit JPG for which a couple of MB is normal depending the size.

You might want to increase the resolution if they say they barely meet the minimum.
 

cbay

Senior Member
You're converting an uncompressed 16bit Tiff (100+Mb is about normal) to a 8bit JPG for which a couple of MB is normal depending the size.

You might want to increase the resolution if they say they barely meet the minimum.

Ok, a little reading and it seems file size and resolution are not the same thing i guess. I need to get my head around this end of things before getting these prints made.
 

J-see

Senior Member
File size depends entirely upon the data an image contains. Evidently the larger that image, the higher that file size can be but it's not that important. A small color shot can easily outweigh a larger B&W when it comes to file size.

What you want to know is how large your print will be and at which dpi they print. That defines how large the initial image has to be.
 

J-see

Senior Member
They have a pixel chart, but two different columns of sizes. ?? Pixel Chart by Nations Photo Lab - Photo Sizes For Printing
Also, this would be the "dimensions" in Lr export?

The two columns show the required height/width of the -to be printed- shot at its respective quality. When you export in LR, you can select the height/width which correspond with those two columns.

If your shot is limited in resolution (after cropping as an example) you can check how large it can be printed at 300dpi and if those dimensions don't meet your requirement, you can increase size by decreasing quality and have it printed at the lower dpi.
 
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