When you export to JPEG, what quality settings do you use? I'm having a hard time deciding whether I want to use Quality 80 in NX Studio and end up with some of my 24MP images being over 10MB, or drop down to Quality 70 which seems to reduce the size by about 40%. It doesn't help that JPEG quality seems to have no bearing between programs, Quality 70 in NX Studio seems to be similar to Quality 90 in basic editing software like Pixelmator. Using the same settings for all my exports though, some pics just come out to tiny file sizes, which feels wrong for the image size in pixels. Take pic related, this is Quality 70.
And this is Quality 80. Can you tell the difference?
>>4517858I literally can't. I'm not even sure there is a difference.maybe it depends on the type of picture too but I don't know what can be more detail dense than fur and I can't see shit for differences in the fut even at very large pixel hunting zoom.it HAD to shave the bits somewhere, but I can't tell where.I mean there are some veeery subtle differences but the thing is I can't tell which one is better, just makes it look like different compression passes.
>>4517857it's easier to tell in an image with hard straight edges like distant buildings with sky behind.
>>4517858I notice only the tiniest bit difference super pixel peeping at 400% in a few small areas, certainly not 55% more information that the file sizes would suggest. The differences I did see were just differences, not any kind of quality change you see when you up from super low jpg compression (extreme macroblocking)
>>4517877That's fair, here's another one, not exactly a distant building but the closest thing I had available. This is Quality 70.
>>4517877>>4517904Whoops, Quality 80 for this is over 5MB. See here: https://files.catbox.moe/mtvpzo.JPG
>>4517907can't really do a fair comparison because the color difference is pretty huge
>>4517911oh shit, I think I was shooting with Adobe RGB when I took this, must be handled differently on 4chan vs catbox.Here is quality 70: https://files.catbox.moe/a3vyw0.JPGhere is quality 80: https://files.catbox.moe/exlpe6.JPGThey should both be in sRGB now, and I've put both on catbox to prevent any other weird issues.
>>4517913Not seeing anything worth the extra size. Probably need a bigger quality difference setting to notice anything.
>>4517913post a 100 for comparison
>>4517857The thing that decides quality is not pixel peeping, it's purpose. If you are printing, then you need the highest quality possible. If you are sharing them on social media or 4chan, you want to pick a quality that is below their threshold for downsampling/compressing, because their process will be lossier than yours. If you don't know yet what you're going to do with it, then it strictly depends on how much space you have. If you have terabytes left, save at highest quality. If you need to save space, you probably want to keep a shortlist of photos that are good and that you keep at highest quality, and the rest should be compressed to 70 or 80 quality.
>>4517936But if pixel peeping shows zero discernible difference, what would be the point of saving at a higher quality to begin with? Almost any print you'd make would have smaller details than blowing up the image on your monitor, so if that doesn't show a difference, why would a print?
>>4517857I follow old recommendations like this, always just export at 85 or 93.Resolution matters too, and you don't need to be exporting full res all the time. Even for client work, most of my stuff gets resized to 20mp for delivery.If you do high volume of work (or have storage costs like Pixieset), JPEGMini is a great option for reducing file size while retaining better quality.
For basically everything, I export @ JPEG92. There is basically no quality difference between this and 100. I have storage and an extra megabyte per photo is not going to somehow inundate me with issues. If 1MB of difference somehow concerns you then get a job.But, for online sharing you are often capped at certain MB or bandwidth limits, so I will go out of my way to recompress a photo for JPEG80. Lower is not needed unless you're really trying to fit as many files into 5MB as possible or something.I have detected artefacting in some photos with the red channel at JPEG85 before. Only a few times, but it's enough to have a higher standard.
>>4517950> if pixel peeping shows zero discernible difference, what would be the point of saving at a higher quality to begin with?Compression artifacts differ based on what image they are applied to. For example, applying jpeg compression to a very clean digital image will save a lot of space for no apparent quality loss, but on a film photo, the grainy areas will turn to mush pretty fast.My point is that pixel peeping is not an effective method of deciding what compression to use, unless you have infinite time and want to pixel peep every image before applying compression. Just apply a standard compression recommended for your purpose and you'll be fine.>Almost any print you'd make would have smaller details than blowing up the image on your monitor, so if that doesn't show a difference, why would a print?Correct, prints usually work well even at low quality. But there is cases where it won't: again, fine details may look mushy, dark areas blocky, etc. So it's better to be safe, especially if you have a modern computer with terabytes of storage that can hold more or less an infinite amount of jpeg image.For safest, I wouldn't go below 90. For good quality, I would go 80. For web and Instagram where pic quality is not important, I would go 70. Under that, artifacts will appear even at low magnification.
>>4517986I save my RAWs on hard drives at home, these files are to dump in my camera roll on my phone/iPad for showing people, sharing online, my own casual viewing. Those devices have limited storage. Saving to 90 or 100 quality is notably sharper but at huge file sizes, since I already have the RAW backed up I can always "reprint" from that at a super high quality if needed.Since JPEG quality numbers seem to vary by program, I've been using Irfanview to view the quality of JPEGs, it's got its own arbitrary scale but I can compare between programs now at least. Irfanview says that the Quality 80 from NX Studio is 90 JPEG quality, while Quality 70 is only dropped to 87 JPEG quality, but crucially it adds 2x2 chroma subsampling. I imagine coming off a bayer sensor in the first place the chroma subsampling has virtually zero impact, so that seems to explain the minimal difference in quality despite the huge file size difference. I have no idea how this compares to Lightroom's outputs as I don't use it. If someone wants to post some various outputs from Lightroom I can get the quality levels in Irfanview to have a point of comparison. My suspicion is that any "pro focused" image editor (Lightroom, NX Studio, etc.) has a JPEG scale curved to a higher quality than say, Paint.NET or Pixelmator.
>>4517913biggest difference I found is in the shingles - more grainy in higher quality, but it's very subtle. I can't see it at 100%. I think not worth the bigger file size.
