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hey gang Scott Davenport here in this video we're going to talk about print size vs. file size print size being how large you can make a print on your printer or add your print shop and file size being the amount of hard disk space that photo file takes up on your computer and they are different and this came to me from a question that was asked Yetta this guy had a 100 kilobyte file or so so pretty small compact photo file but was making a pretty healthy sized print like say 11 by 14 and that just didn't feel intuitive it's like well how can I be getting such a decent sized print from such a small file on my computer well what that comes down to is the resolution at which you print and how many pixels you have in the photo file so let's talk about the print size part of this first so over here in layer I've got this photo here and I have the the information pane up to show me what pixels I have I have a 4800 pixels by 7200 pixels roughly speaking so I've got a lot of pixels there right this is from a 42 megabyte cameras lots of pixels in here when I export this to a photo file assuming I don't resize it and change the the pixel ratio I'm gonna have the same number of pixels so all those pixels go out to the file when I go to print I need to choose a resolution now for a inkjet printer at home or some type of print that a person's gonna hold in their hands maybe at arm's length you know eight by ten 11 by 14 300 pixels per inch will give a very good high quality print and so looking at these numbers here 4800 7200 if I were to print at 300 pixels per inch I take those numbers divided by 300 and I come up with something that's an about a 16 inch by 24 inch print that's a very large print now the ones on the wall behind me are 16 by 20 so even a little larger than what's behind me there so that's quite a good quality print and it's based on pixels and the pixels per inch that you choose if you're in a metric speaking country convert to centimeters I'm sorry metric system makes sense but we just haven't caught up in the US yet so I gotta talk in inches now can you still make a even larger print from this type of file let's use this you know 4800 by 7200 example yes you can I can choose a lower pixel per inch maybe 200 pixels per inch now I've grown that print size by 33% why would I do that there's a couple of possibilities one is as you make larger and larger prints your viewer is going to be farther and farther away from that print so they're not going to see the pixelation that may be happening and so that would be okay because when you view the photo you're going to be from a distance and it's going to look smooth and clean everything's gonna be fine another might be the type of medium you're printing to you're printing on your high quality photo paper that is going to look very crisp and you want to have a high pixel per inch count do you print to canvas canvas is a little more forgiving and the nature of the canvas is going to make a prints look a little softer than all lines may not be as crisp as they are on you know high quality paper or you know an acrylic or something like that so you can choose a lower pixel per inch and therefore with the same pixels you have get a larger print so that's the print side of things but now let's talk about the file size side of things how much space is a photo file taking up on your hard drive you may have noticed if you've got a set of photos I'll take in with the same camera you export them all using the same settings to say JPEG files and the resulting JPEG files are all of different sizes so what's going on what's controlling that size well there's two things that will have an impact one is something we have immediate control of which is the quality slider in most programs you can set the quality of your export in Inyo and Lightroom that is over here in the file settings when you're exporting you have a quality slider and as you might guess if you take that quality slider and raise it up you'll get a larger and if you lower it down you'll get a smaller file I'm going to ignore this limit file we can do that in Lightroom as well I don't tend to do that and I can to keep my quality around 80 that gives me a good balance between the file size and a good quality photo to share online now the second thing that we don't really have control over for the file size is what's in the photo itself and let me again I'll show you this photos we have on the screen here this photo has a large area of mostly blue a large area of mostly orange another area that's got a mix of blues and whites and you know like brownish blacks so but there are some areas that have a big amount of real estate taken up by a relatively small number of colors and I think that factors into file sizes the analogy I like to use is going to the grocery store and you buy ten cups of yogurt I don't care what flavor they are it's like hanging out about this big blue sky I don't care what the shades of blue are I've got a bunch of blue I go buy ten yogurts I've got ten yogurts I can get a receipt from the store that can convey that information in let's say one of two ways I can get a big long receipt that lists line by line couple of yogurt cup of yogurt cup of yogurt and I get ten lines I get a receipt that I'll have to now stuff into my pocket and take up more space I can also get a receipt or alternatively get a receipt that says a quantity is a cup of yogurt quantity 10 that's it same image information is conveyed but it's a much smaller package so think about that in terms of our photos and our file sizes if the course algorithm is this is all blue that's a whole lot of pixels that are blue and it can represent that in a smaller amount of space I don't have to have you know pixel one is blue pixel two is blue pixel three is blue all the way up to you know pixel 4800 it can be ranges and of course this is a very simplified version of it because the photos need to take into account relative position of the color so on and so forth you start to get the idea here and where that quality slider starts to come into play as well is how sensitive is the export going to be two different tones I go back to this blue sky again maybe if we have a quality of you know 40 which is very low this would be you know blue gray and blue and really nothing else we have a quality of you know eighty or ninety this might be you know blue grayish white and then moving to the right this is more blue gray now this is sky blue and this is our sky blue two in sky blue four and now all the different types of Blues that we could possibly have back to my grocery store analogy now I care about the flavor of the yogurt and say I bought three blueberry three raspberry and four cherry yogurts the smallest way I can represent that information is three lines on my receipt you know the flavor so blueberry yogurt quantity three raspberry yogurt quantity three cherry yogurt quantity four it's not as small as ten yogurts but it's smaller than the full list of each individual yogurt cup so that's what's going on with some of the file compression so rolling that back to the general question you know why are my file sizes different depending on the photo it will depend on the content of the photo the photo has large areas of relatively similar tones those can compress down better and you end up with smaller files I don't really have control of that short of deciding when you're out in the field I'm only gonna photograph things that are gonna result in small files which may be an interesting academic exercise but I don't think that's the way that we approach our photography so it just depends on what you are compressing down what you're exporting out so to wrap this all up your print size is dictated by how many pixels do you have and how many of those pixels do you want to pack into a physical dimension 300 pixels per inch for a high-quality prints that may be held at arm's length maybe 200 pixels per inch for something larger or a different type of medium like a canvas file size is really driven by the file format you're going to choose how much quality do you want in that file format and whether or not you're amping up any compression algorithms that might be present with files like TIFF files have different types of compression options for them just you know squeeze down and try to consolidate the representation of those pixels so when all said and done the file size itself will not dictate what size print that you can make I hope that was interesting for you you found this to be useful if you've got other questions about it or you have more knowledge about this topic please feel free to share it I'm certainly not an expert in image compression algorithms or printing for that matter as well so I would welcome additional folks that have other experiences knowledge in this area share your thoughts in the comments below and if you got other questions you can always hit me up through my website or with the comments on the video and until next time my name's got to have rapport and happy shooting