pappleg

I teach photography as a volunteer at a local senior center. A 50+ yr amateur I did weddings and some commercial work & used 35mm, medium and large format and had my own darkroom for 25yrs. Still learning digital as to a degree I guess we all are and made some assumptions regards IQ and file size settings but wanted to actually see what the differences are so I set up a test. I photographed today a famous Baltimore landmark; the Patterson Park Pagoda as it has considerable details for what I thought would be a good comparison. Using a D810 tripod mounted with a 35mm Zeiss Milvus F2 and cable release with the mirror locked up I made four exposures all at infinity focus and at Aperture priority F5.6: #1 is Basic quality small file size, #2 is Normal quality medium file size, #3 is Fine quality large file size and #4 is Raw. I loaded the images into my iMac with Nikon View Transfer to the desktop and imported into Lightroom CC and in develop mode did an extreme crop of a single window and lattice metal railing for each image expecting dramatically different quality results. They all looked remarkably similar. I had made no adjustments to any of them. I am baffled and will attach the four files. Anyone have a clue why I got this result? Maybe some silly mistake that I am failing to see. Thanks in advance. Pat

Apparently due to file size limitations the system would only let me attach the first two files. I'll try another post and try to attack the other two.

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CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Hi Pappleg. You won't be able to upload a D810 RAW file due to the 20MB attachment limit. Additionally, for anyone to view the RAW will require software to open a file from your model of camera. Regarding other files / file sizes, you might find the details in this post useful for creating files to post.
http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-512745-1.html

As supplement to the details above, you might find this post useful from the Digital Photography School for exporting files from LR.
http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-size-and-export-images-from-lightroom-for-facebook-and-print/

You also should consult your D810 manual to confirm the technical attributes of every file setting. Note the first image you posted has size 3680x2456. The second file is 5520x3680. So, the pixel dimensions are different. You should check also the level of JPEG compression and whether the bit-depth of the colors are different for each setting.

DeanS Loc: Capital City area of North Carolina

I viewed both in download on my iPad and am surprised that the IQ is fairly consistent for both, even after expanding them to perhaps quadruple posted size. In expansion mode, you can see a bird (gull?) to the viewer’s left near the top. Even blown up you can still see the bird quite clearly. Surprising.

Joe Blow

OK, I think we have visited this question recently.

You have two separate items here and, like many, have them confused.

The first is the file size of your picture. The second is the resolution it is reproduced at on our monitors. You played with file size but measured it with resolution, only that isn't the way it works.

Saving at the best resolution might give an image that can be printed at 36"x24"" with no loss of quality. The lower file size could only be printed at 20"x15" with no loss of quality. (sizes are representative)

BUT, when viewed on a computer monitor, they will appear the same. That is because the monitor will display at a set DPI or PPI (dots per inch or pixels per inch, they are the same thing) that it is set for. Only if the DPI of the image is less than the PPI of the image will you see degradation on your monitor. Printing that lower file size at 36"x24" would show a poor quality image.

I hope this helps explain it.

pappleg

I believe I understand what you are saying but I altered not only file size(from small to large) but also image quality (from Basic to Fine) with no apparent difference-would that not affect resolution?
Is, then, resolution only a function of printing and not visual representation on the monitor?

I truly appreciate your input; I feel like a novice all over again!! Pat

spraguead Loc: Boston, MA

for most monitors, the answer is "yes". The difference in quality will be apparent as you proceed to print, or move into production for commercially printed materials.

camerapapi Loc: Miami, Fl.

Many people laughed at Ken Rockwell when he said he was shooting his camera with JPEG files and usually at small file sizes.

tropics68 Loc: Georgia

I have been playing around with this topic for a couple of weeks and I too was surprised by the results. Using my 5Ds I took a couple of shots at the local zoo with a 70-200mm f4L lens. I took both raw and jpeg. I saved one copy of each shot as SOOC and one copy was exported as legacy in Photoshop CC. The exported files were resized to 1024 pixels on the shortest side maintaining the same aspect ratio. On my 24 inch monitor the two images at full screen are indistinguishable. Printed at 8 X 10 on my HP inkjet they are also indistinguishable. The SOOC shot was 8688 X 5792 pixels and 18.6 MB the down sampled copy was 1536 X 1024 pixels and 280KB. That is a huge difference for images that will only be looked at on a monitor, printed on a home inkjet or emailed. As I am just into this for the enjoyment, do not sell pictures and do not have any reason to print a poster 120" X 80" I guess I will be doing a lot of this down sampling.

Catnlion Loc: Arizona City, Arizona

Long day. Please allow me to restate the answer to make sure I understand.

I rarely print anything. So my stuff is viewed on various monitors. So as long as the settings in the camera are greater than the monitor viewed on file size and resolution doesn't matter because it will all be displayed at the max level the monitor can handle and the rest is "wasted"?

therwol Loc: USA

You can't even upload jpegs from that camera. They come out between 22-28 megabytes apiece, depending upon subject matter and even the lens used. There are a number of cameras whose pictures have to be reduced in size for uploading to this site. I wish those in charge of this site would invest in a bit more storage so this limitation could be eliminated.

JohnR Loc: The Gates of Hell

Hi - did just this same exercise myself last week. Got heaps of scathing responses blaming my inabilities to discern things/understand what was happening etc etc ad nauseam. Bit rude some of 'em ! Anyway it appears that the different images at Basic, Normal and Fine are simply greater/lesser degrees of compression and the greater part of the image data is there in all three. Maybe a little more data is discarded for the higher compressions but according to the experts it won't be observable in normal editing /viewing situations. I liked one Hoggers note on Ken Rockwell shooting only with Basic Jpeg ! Guess it saves on space ! Not sure about saving edited images at the original compression however as apparently more data is discarded doing that but most editing programmes do allow you to save at lower compression hopefully preserving data that way. Of interest is the default Nikon setting which is jpeg Normal !

pappleg

If I am reading everyone above right it makes virtually no difference if one is posting and viewing on monitors regardless of whether it is a 27" iMac or 7" tablet the image from a Basic/small file and a Fine/large file they will appear mostly identical. The differences only become apparent when printing and printing very large at that. Then it does make perfect sense to limit the file upload to UHH as the only impact is placing a larger burden on their server. I know this is what ISPs (such as Verizon and Comcast) do for emails with attachments. Every day is a new learning experience. Thanks for all who chimed in on this-now I get it and can pass along to my students. Pat

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

There is a difference to how much value you get from zooming in while editing and how much cropping is productive.

Fifteen or so years ago, when I was thinking of going from film to digital, I had a professional scan some 35mm Kodachrome 25 slides of mine, which I chose because they had fine detail, mostly writing. He created 3000x2000 JPEG scans. I set up my projector and screen in our family room, where the computer was located. Every detail, every color change I could find on a slide was also on the corresponding scan. In later years I got a camera that could use the old lens originally used to take the slides, and discovered it gave sharper pictures on a 16mp camera than it had on Kodachrome, so I am now fairly confident that anything beyond 3000x2000 JPEG does buy digital zoom and editing options but no real gain at normal viewing.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

To see the differences I took both images and loaded them into layers in Photoshop. One image was smaller than the other so I enlarged it to be about the same size. I then ran the auto image align to overlay the images (that also adjusts scaling so they are aligned as well as possible). I then changed the blending to difference. The first image below shows the result of the difference. It's fairly dark, indicating the differences are not large, although there are some differences at edges (not really surprising). The second image is the same except I brightened it up (about a factor of 5) so you can see where the differences are. The third image shows the bird (for those who had trouble finding it [of course it's only in one of the images]).

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