theehmann

Dear friends,
I need your help in layman's terms. When I take my images to be enlarged in an 8X12 size, I'm told that they are too compressed.This happens most of the time. I shoot in RAW and enhance them in Elements 9 and Nik software. There are so many choices in which to save but the default is PDF. Other choices are among a bunch, BMP, GIF, JPEG,Photoshop Raw, TIF, etc. Also do I resize the images prior to enhancing them or afterwards? Any help you can give me would be most appreciated as I'm at my wits end with losing so much resolution.

mallen1330 Loc: Chicago western suburbs

Save as TIFF, original size for printing... TIFF format has no loss of pixels due to compression. You may have to crop your image to fit a specific print size.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

You don't say what size your photos are to begin with (or what camera you use to take them).
Strange, I've never seen PDF as a default for saving photos that started out as raw.
It certainly is not a format I would choose.
After doing all the editing your want to do in ACR (within Elements9), you can open the image in PSE, do further edits if necessary, then SaveAs a .jpg file. Or if you expect to want to do more edits later on, TIFF would be a good choice, except that it give you very large files. I never use BMP because I'm not familiar with that format, nor do I every use GIF for photos.
So, in short, do the first edit of your raw images in ACR of PSE9, then "open" the image (button on right hand bottom of ACR screen). Finish your editing in PSE9, then SaveAs .jpg or .tif.
As to resizing, or cropping, I usually do that just before having my photos printed.
Oh, and when you save your photos as jpg, a pop-up should give you a choice of quality to save (and compress) your photo at. I always pick the highest quality (I think that's number 12). If your quality is too low, it may cause the warning that your photos are too compressed for printing.

I am not at all familiar with Nik software, so cannot say anything sensible about that.

JohnSwanda Loc: San Francisco

I would ask the printer how they prefer the files to be prepared.

neilds37 Loc: Port Angeles, WA

Always works for me...

theehmann

Thanks so much for your help. I really appreciate it.

theehmann

Thanks so much.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

If a lab accepts a tiff file, it will be converted to jpeg. There is little benefit to saving a tiff unless the lab specifically processes 16 bit wide gamut tiff files.

However, the issue may not be compression. I would take a guess and say that the image is too small - in pixels, to be printed at a reasonable size.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

What are the dimensions, in pixels, that you are sending to the lab?
When you save the jpeg, what quality setting are you using?

Don't use pdf, use jpeg, with a quality setting of at least 85% and do not resize your images - send them the full size image. For example if your camera makes images that are 4000x6000 pixels, that's what you send them, unless you crop a little. Send them a jpeg that has as many pixels as possible. The quality setting will also have an impact, both on image quality and file size. Try to send the best quality you can, but realize that there is little visual difference between a jpeg saved at 85% and one saved at 100%. The 100% file will be considerably larger, in mb, than the lower quality one.

This should address all of your problems.

theehmann

Thanks so much for your helpful response.

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

TIF.