The image exceeds the size Save for Web & Devices was designed for

[snorkeler]

I just upgraded from CS3 to CS5. I assumed that Save for Web & Devices would have been redesigned so that it would not complain with modern large photos that they were just too big!

However, it still does. I just don't get this. Photoshop in general now is editing very large images. It should be able to handle them also in this feature.

Is this just a legacy message, or is it really true that this feature can only handle small images?

[Tai_Lao]

No one, absolutely nobody needs large images on the web.  That's why Save for Web was designed for web-sized images.

Photoshop is working as designed.

[snorkeler]

Tai Lao misunderstands my question. I am referring to the size of the image you begin before you produce a smaller web version.

The problem is that Photoshop appears to have trouble handling large images for this process. Typically, you edit a large photo image. You don't want to resize it, but rather just make a web version (or several smaller versions). That's what this menu command is for, presumably.

Here's how to replicate this: open a 20-30MB photo. Go to File:Save for Web and Devices. You'll get a dialog that says: "The image exceeds the size Save for Web & Devices was designed for. You may experience out of memory errors and slow performance. Are you sure you want to continue?"

Now, I'm working on a machine with tons of RAM, lots of free disk space for paging, no issues there. No other PS operation complains. Why this one? There are lots of image files now that are above 10MB. PS should be able to cope.

To be fair, despite this warning, it will generally work anyway.

I just think in this price zone, PS ought to be able to handle today's large images gracefully. Canon's pro cameras now produce 20MB+ images.

[Tai_Lao]

snorkeler wrote:

Tai Lao misunderstands my question…

No, snorkeler, I do understand your question.  It is you who are misconstruing my remark.

snorkeler wrote:

…I am referring to the size of the image you begin before you produce a smaller web version…

So am I. 

Wo Tai Lao Le

我太老了

[snorkeler]

Thanks to Marian Driscoll for clarifying the intent of this File: command. It was not obvious to me that you are not meant to go directly from large images to web or device versions. Perhaps that is made clear in the documentation.

It would be nice to be able to do that. We keep our images high res for print purposes, but also sometimes create web versions of them, and thought that command was for that purpose. Now I realize that I must make a smaller version first. I was trying to avoid the image degradation that creeps in with multiple resizing.

[Guest]

snorkeler wrote:

...I was trying to avoid the image degradation that creeps in with multiple resizing.

That should not really be a concern for most situations. If it is, there are plenty of demonstrations of good workflows out on the net. Here is one. You can create an action to automate these steps.

[snorkeler]

Thanks for your comments, Marian.

As a book publisher, now an iOS app publisher also, it is not clear to me how you discern what Adobe intended for Save for Web and Devices. They don't  tell us much. If you have found more details, please point me to them.

I dig and dig in the documentation, and nowhere see guidance as to its purpose and limitations. I wish there were more. The options and tools in it seem very good for taking an image you use for print, and making a web or iPhone version--better than I find in other tools. Apart from the warning, it sure looks like a general purpose resizing/optimization tool. I would like to know more from Adobe about what Save for Web actually does to my images in this process. Perhaps other tools would be better for images destined for devices such as the iPhone/iPad, rather than the web.

As far as we're concerned, the only issue is that Save for Web doesn't cope well with large files. There are ways to deal with that. Adobe has provided us all with some truly great tools in CS, but perhaps have neglected this corner a bit. Thanks for pointing me to workarounds. They're more awkward, but will get us there.

For my part, I mostly just ignore the warning, use Save for Web, and get my web/device images. Perhaps some day Adobe will tweak Save for Web and make it into the great general purpose tool it could be. In the meantime, they could at least put a 'don't show this message again' checkbox in the warning as Scott Falkner suggests.

[Guest]

It is quite easy to discern what Adobe intended... if you are a web/UI designer. I can understand everyone's confusion if they are not web designers. Web/UI designers always work at 100% so scaling is not a big concern in SFW.

I've noticed that SFW has been heavily used by many as a crutch for failing to understand image preparation. We see it often here in the forum.

Someone's image won't save well to JPG that can be emailed to a client? It is probably in 16bit or CMYK. Instead of advising them to sort out their workflow and understand that CMYK and 16 bit imagery is not supported in JPG, we simply say "use SFW". While software is certainly there to make our lives easier, it cannot replace our own common sense. There's no warning on our flatbed scanner that yells at us for scanning a 5x7 photo at 2400 ppi when all we need is a printed reproduction at 4x6 at 300 ppi.

As noted in the link I posted, sharpening is an often needed step after resampling. As SFW does not offer sharpening, it makes sense to prepare an image for the web at 100% before going to SFW.

Of course, there is a place to make feature requests here by following the 'Contact' links at the top and bottom of every adobe.com web page.

[snorkeler]

My teenage daughter taught me the perils of trying to infer 'intent'. As she succinctly said 'You DON'T know why I did that!" She certainly was correct.

I prefer documentation over trying to guess how something works, or its 'intent'.

As every change you make to an original image degrades it, we prefer to do as little as possible. Preserving the original sharpness in a good picture is better than using 'unsharp mask', which, good as it is, changes things.

We are going from high resolution RAW images to smaller images that display well on a small device such as an iPhone or iPad. We'd like to do that in as few steps as possible, for efficiency. That's all. To the extent that PS makes that possible, we love it. To the extent it makes that elaborate and awkward, we like it less.

[Guest]

snorkeler wrote:

I prefer documentation over trying to guess how something works, or its 'intent'.

I thought that documentation was provided to you from several sources.

1. A Photoshop developer explicitly stated in this thread that SFW was not intended for image scaling.
2. Photoshop's help files show a PSD image at 100% being converted to a web image format.
3. The professional photographer that I linked to shows how they scale an image before going to SFW.

Sharpening an image for the web helps to clarify the information that is lost when you scale it down and lose detail. We might also sharpen images to compensate for the smoothing that may occur during compression in SFW.

If you want a single step solution, consider a droplet so you can process a whole mess of images at once. SFW only lets you process one image at a time.

[p_d_f]

"It is probably in 16bit or CMYK"

While it's true that jpegs don't support 16 bit per channel or alpha channels, there is absolutely no problem saving CMYK files as jpegs when needed.

[Scott Falkner]

You are mistaken, Mr. Tai. The warning is inappropriate and should be either removed from the program or allow a “Don’t show this warning again,” option. Of course when saving an image for web I will want a smaller image, that’s why there are options to scale the image. I often start with a larger image when using Save for Web, with the full intention of scaling it down. Warning me is pointless.

It’s as though the door to my house knows I only own a bicycle so it warns me whenever I leave the house with a large package that won’t fit on my bicycle, ignorant of the fact that I have borrowed my mom’s car.

There are many improvements that Save for Web has needed since it was introduced. This warning is one. Another is that it often takes a long time to generate the preview before the user can enter any data, like the actual image size needed. The program takes several seconds to generate a useless preview of a too large image, rather than letting the use set the size first. It is also unforgivable that the presets, in both Illustrator and Photoshop, do not remember scaling.

[Tai_Lao]

You are entitled to your opinion, Mr. Falkner, but I respectfully disagree with it.

You can always post a feature request for Adobe to consider.  I do not need such a "feature" and I appreciate the alert message.

[Scott Falkner]

Tai Lao wrote:

You can always post a feature request for Adobe to consider.

I have, several times. I usually call the official feature request page the Memory Hole.

[Tai_Lao]

Scott Falkner wrote:

… I usually call the official feature request page the Memory Hole.

I sympathize with that.  It does indeed have the feeling of a black hole in outer space.

[Chris Cox]

We do read the user reported bugs and feature requests.

But we get too many to respond to individually.

[Guest]

Scott Falkner wrote:

The program takes several seconds to generate a useless preview of a too large image, rather than letting the use set the size first.

There's the rub. Should we go the route you suggest, we'd lose that warning prompt that the image is too large but we'd be held up with another prompt to enter image dimensions (or click to render the preview) on every image when SFW loads.  That would be more intrusive than the current warning. We're probably dealing with the best option as it is currently designed... unless you can suggest a better idea that requires less clicks.

[Scott Falkner]

There is nothing, except lack of will and perhaps lack of skill, to prevent Adobe from making Photoshop render while letting the user input data. Why not let me change the image size or file format while the image is calculated in the background? If Adobe cared about providing an intuitive and responsive user experience, they would have done this already. So we know how important that is.

[Guest]

That certainly sounds like a feasible plan for Adobe engineers to work on and possibly release in CS6 or CS7.

I'd be more interested in something I can do today on my own terms. I can spend 10 seconds to create an action that scales the image and then passes it on to SFW. A single F-key assigned to this action seems more appealing to my own user experience than smashing the multiple keys required just to fire up SFW.

Here's are the steps I use for an action I call 'Prep 4 SFW' tied to my F12 key:

1) Image Size - scale to width of 1024 pixels (or whatever common size you need for your web template) with constrained proportions, bicubic interpolation

2) Select Save For Web menu item

3) Select previous history state (restores the canvas to the original size after saving as JPG/GIF/PNG in SFW)

This very basic action seems to be much more efficient than any previous programming suggestion in this thread, except of course, when Chris mentioned it in his own post.

[geranium16]

Hi Marion. I have been frustrated over this same shortcoing of SFW. I am an amateur PS user with CS4. I have read through all the letters and replies concerning this issue and one of the original questions still has not been answered. You seem knowledgable and logical in your contributions to the discussion so perhaps you  could answer it. How big is too big to process a file in Save for the Web and Devices.i would really appreciate your opinion. thanks

[Guest]

You can experiment to see how big is too big.

SFW is designed primarily to experiment with image compression, not image size.The images that I send to it are already sized.

You can set a temporary size to your image before it is passed off to SFW through an action associated with a hot key. At the end of the SFW function, you can have your action restore the image to its original size.

[geranium16]

Hi  again Marion.Many thanks for your advice and info. I am new to this forum process so I hope its Ok to change the topic slightly. Please could you give advice re the following. Most books advise you to resharpen after Saving for Web and Devices. the trouble is if you use the unsharp mask you end up with the image being changed back into  PSD format. then you have to do a Save As to change back  into JPEG format. Is there any way around this?

[Guest]

geranium16 wrote:

...Most books advise you to resharpen after Saving for Web and Devices....

Which books? You are correct in assuming that it makes no sense.

[Guest]

> Save for web was originally designed to optimize web graphics by  squeezing out bytes while retaining quality.  It was not meant to scale  and then optimize large images. This is demonstrated in the alert  message.

and I should care why ? Software does not exist to massage the egos of the programmers, and I (as a programmer for 25 years) do not care a fig for whatever they "intended". It says "save for web" and that's exactly what I want to do - and it offers to shrink the image so one can hardly argue credibly that it wasn't designed to do that. It shouldn't fall to the users to divine the aspirations of the programmers, but contrariwise for the programmers to cater to their users. And don't get me started on the fact that the tool forgets whatever you set it last time despite the obvious fact that you might to squash consecutive images the same way. Much of Photoshop's design is still rooted in the 90s Nnedless to say I have enough RAM and CPU that the tool never does fail despite the fatuous warning!

[Guest · Accepted solution]

Save for web was originally designed to optimize web graphics by squeezing out bytes while retaining quality.  It was not meant to scale and then optimize large images. This is demonstrated in the alert message.

You could submit a feature request to Adobe to alter the original intent of SFW.

SFW may display 4 versions of an image in various types of optimization. This requires saving 4 temporary files. Imagine trying to save a huge image 4 times at once through 'File-Save As'. This is why you see that alert message. It takes time to generate those temp files, especially when you throw a huge file at it.

Consider a scripted solution to this where a copy of your image is first reduced, then transferred to SFW.