Oversize JPEGs on export
Hello,
I may as well ask this just in case somebody else who has seen the issue see this post in the two days before this firum's death.
I am seeing enormous JPEG file sizes on files exported from C1. The 8 bit JPEGs are frequently even larger than the 16 RAWs they came from. This seems to affect DNG RAWs from a Leica M10R more than it does Nikon NEFs. But I do see C1 JPEGs being larger than expected from C1. I have compared Quality 100, sRGB JPEGs from several programs and in every case, the other programs produce significantly smaller files.
Anybody seen this?
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I agree that the 100 quality JPG files can be quite large. It's a bit hard to compare with the original raw file sizes because there are various compressed raw formats - for instance a NEF file could be Compressed, Lossless Compressed, or Uncompressed, from some camera models at least. This would have different raw file sizes but the output JPG would be the same from all of them, for the same quality setting. I don't know about Leica files - do they use compression?
In my experience, there is a huge difference in file size between setting the quality slider at 100 or at, say 85. I've just tried it on an NEF file from a Nikon Z8, and at 100 the JPG comes out at 27.5 MB, whereas at 85, it comes out at only 7MB. And yet I can't really see much difference between them - maybe the 100 quality one looks very slightly sharper, but it's hard to tell, and looking at different parts of the image I keep changing my mind as to which is sharper. (On screen, at any rate - I haven't tried printing them.) I almost never use the 100 setting.
I tried an experiment and exported the same image, with roughly the same crop and similar adjustments using Lightroom at a quality setting of 100, and it came out at 23.6 MB, so a little smaller than Capture One produced. But with the quality setting at 85, Lightroom produced a JPG of 15.3 MB, which is more than double what Capture One produced. Again, pixel-peeping to an unrealistic degree, maybe the 100 quality one is very slightly sharper - or maybe not.
Nikon's own NX Studio exports the same image to 28.1 MB with their setting at 100, and to 11.1 MB with their setting at 85. (The image looks horrible, because I couldn't get NX Studio to give me a result I liked the look of, but that isn't the point of the exercise.)
So at the highest setting, the files are not very much different in size, though Lightroom is smallest, Capture One is next, and NX Studio is largest. I haven't tried Affinity Photo - it seems not to be able to handle compressed raw files from a Nikon Z8. But my test doesn't bear out your experience of other apps producing significantly smaller files.
At 85, the file sizes vary a lot more, Capture One created the smallest JPG by quite a margin, then Lightroom, then NX Studio. I conclude that the quality sliders in the various apps mean fairly arbitrary things: 85 in one is not at all the same thing as 85 in another! Nevertheless the 85 setting in all three apps I tried produced results that were not very different in appearance on screen from their 100 quality counterparts.
Ian
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