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John Hawkinson
Inspiring
November 26, 2016
Question

JPEG -> PSD gives 10x size increase?

  • November 26, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 926 views

I looked around at a bunch of old threads about PSD size bloat and didn't really get a clear answer.

If I open a 2.6MB JPEG in Photoshop CC and save it as a PSD with no changes, I get a 26MB PSD.

Is this normal and expected? It seems a bit...much.

(Of course my application was a little more complicated, but not much. I opened a JPEG, masked two areas and applied adjustment layers. I wanted to save the PSD to save the workflow, but really the only information in it that mattered was the mask regions and the adjustment layer settings.)

Of course Photoshop should not be storing raster data with lossy compression in the general case, so it's easy to see why the file size is roughly the same as saving it as an lossless-compressed TIFF. But on the other hand, a lossless JPEG2000 of the same file is only 6 MB.

But I guess I would expect that a JPEG opened in PS with no changes to the background layer would preserve the data in JPEG format for file-size reasons,

at least until or unless the user did some transformation on that layer that would require changing the JPEG data.

So, what's the deal? And why is PSD compression so much worse than lossless JPEG2000 compression?

Thanks!

p.s.: I don't think it matters much, but the image is

JPEG 4032x3024 4032x3024+0+0 8-bit sRGB 2.381MB 0.000u 0:00.000

p.p.s: This is really a theoretical question. I don't actually need to reduce the file size, I just…want to.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Silkrooster
Legend
November 26, 2016

You are right, compression plays a big role. But there is more to it. Jpg does not support layers, transparency, masks, layer effects and so on. So each layer you added including adjustment layers and masks bloat the file size.

Difference between psd and tiff could be compression scheme. Some are way better than others.

Other than that, it is probably more technical than I could answer.

John Hawkinson
Inspiring
November 26, 2016

That's not really what I'm getting at.

There were two questions, really:

(1) Why is an unedited background layer that originates from a JPEG file not stored in JPEG compression inside a PSD file.

(2) Why is PSD's lossless compression more than 4x worse than JPEG2000's lossless compression? It's not like JPEG2000 is a new technology, being from 2000 :-)

. Yes, I know, it's not wildly successful, but still.

Thanks.

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 26, 2016

1 - You can do that. It's called a Smart Object, and the wrapping increases file size even more than a plain PSD.

2 - I can't answer that, but the way most of us see it is that PSDs and TIFFs take up whatever space they need to support the properties they do. If you need smaller file size you pick a different format.