Process Recipe woes

Andrew Bennett

• 14. November 2016 02:19

I know less than nothing about the various elements of the Process Recipe tool. And I find the Help guide, while generally very useful, a little light on this subject.

format - This part I get.
Quality - it's intuitive, but I'd love to know what it's doing
ICC Profile - Good grief that confuses me; what do I choose? what the hell is it?
Resolution - No clue. I seriously don't even have a hint on what this means. What does the number section do? what should I use? Inches make sense to me (American born).
Scale - is that the 4X6, 5X7, 8X10 bit? and what is the "percentage" doing?

I would be indebted to anyone who could put a little light on this subject for me. I shoot a Sony A77ii A mount, and a Sony A7ii E mount and work on a PC (Surface Book).

Thanks
Andrew

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  Ian Wilson

  Moderator

  • 14. November 2016 18:26

  

  Andrew
  
  Here goes with some of it at least.
  
  Quality - try reading this. or see what else you can find using Google. But I think I am right in saying that a setting of say 70 in Capture One is not necessarily the same amount of compression as 70 in some other app. For better or for worse, my go-to value is 85 but that is probably more than is necessary considering most of my pictures end up on Facebook. The smaller the number, the smaller the file size, but the quality will drop off. I suspect that if I cut it down to 70, I'd still get perfectly acceptable results for my purposes, and might not notice the difference.
  
  ICC profile - depends on what you want to do with the output file. If you want to put it on the web, for example, choose sRGB. Maybe if you have other plans for it, use Adobe RGB? Try Googling Adobe RGB and finding out what it is best for. You could try this article .
  
  Resolution - there's probably no good reason not to leave it at 300 px per inch. Printers generally work at 300 dots per inch. (But if you were planning on printing it out advertising hoarding sized, that might be different.
  
  Scale is NOT things like 4 x 6, 8 x 10 etc. Those would be the ratios you would set with the crop tool. Scale is how big the output file is compared with the original. So if I have a 24 MP camera, my image might have started out at 6000 x 4000 pixels. But if I take a photo and want to put a small version of it on a website, I might very well want a JPG file of say only 600 x 400 pixels. It will be big enough for what I want and you don't want to slow down the loading of your web page. So I would have a recipe that set a scale of 10%. Or instead of a %age, I could choose a fixed size one setting the longest edge at 600. (That way if I had cropped the original image a bit, I'd still get 600 x 400 in the end.)
  
  So people sometimes save a recipe for web output with a small %age scale or a small maximum longest side, JPG format, plus a comparatively low quality setting because it will be good enough for putting on Facebook. On the other hand, if you want to get it printed at high quality, you might want to output as TIFF, at maximum (100%) resolution.
  
  Hope that is some help!
  
  Ian

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  Andrew Bennett

  • 14. November 2016 22:37

  Ian - thank you. that was EXACTLY what I was looking for. And pointing me to Ken Rockwell's site is always good.
  Andrew

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