Why is PS saving my image only 10% of the actual size of the file.

Hi Everyone, thank you for your help. I think I was not explaining my issue well. I have set my camera back to normal RAW and the problem has in fact stopped. Thanks for all your time to reply. I am happy to know that if I take an mRAW file with my camera I will get this issue. Files are now saving from 32MB to 7MB which is the normal (in my case) and what I expected. Size does not matter but my problem was size was equal to quality in this case. the files were like a compressed file was compressed if that makes sense so the quality was so degraded. The size was just an indicator for me that this might be where the problem lay.

An example I posted a couple of weeks ago (and not even an extreme one). Two images of identical pixel dimensions, and identical jpeg compression level. One is 367 kB, the other 58 kB:

Saved as TIFF, they would both be about 4 MB.

The jpeg compression will squeeze a file down to a few percent of original size, at the price of irretrievable data loss. Other than that, there is no way to predict the file size of a jpeg, except more fine detail will make it bigger.

Hi Nolane9,

Why do you care about the size?
It's quite normal that your RAW file is bigger that the output file and again, size really does not matter...in terms of bytes. Do you want a huge size file? Convert it so 16bit and safe as not compressed tiff.

Actually you have to be happy we have such great compression algorythm which are able to reduce the file size with almost no quality change (and yes, it depends on what are you going to do with your file).

Same for Premiere for example, you create a video, you export it, you have a 2 giga file, than you compress it with Handbreak and book, you have a 200 mb file which is almost the same quality (you rally can't see the difference) as your original one.

Don't focus on the size but on the quality of the image it self.

Cheers,

Martin

A final comment is found in an interesting book titled "Vision and Art, the Biology of Seeing" by a Prof of Neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School made this passing comment about jpg in relation to our visual system" *..."Image compression algorithms, such as JPEG, can save a lot of memory. For example, I made a large Photoshop image of a red square on a white background, and JPEG compressed it from 300 megabytes to 1..."

In your Camera Raw dialog take a look at the bottom of the screen in the middle. Those are the settings used to resize any image before it is open in Photoshop. Perhaps it got changed at some point and you forgot.

To reset or change the settings click the line and a dialog will open. Change settings there and if you like save them as a preset.

Something easier to remember

Going from 16 bit to 8 bit halves the size and a jpg file (read befioe opening) can reduce it quite a bit more, depending upon the image.

Hi

What file type are you saving as?  A jpeg will compress using lossy compression and, depending on the quality setting, the loss can be very noticeable.

A PSD or TIFF can be saved without (or with lossless) compression - keeping that image data

Dave