[pentaxk10duser]

Hi All . If Im mainly saving my pictures on my cumputer and looking at them when the screen saver starts up and sometimes printing 4x6 and and 8x10 is the biggest I will ever get. I shoot in raw and when I convert to jpg there is the Image quality that goes from 1 to 10 .which number should I pick and the other is the output resolution it goes from 1 to over 350 whick number should that be set for. and the last thing is the size like for example 3872x2592 ,what size should I put that at. One more thing how many mb's should the picture end up being or less than a mb. thanks for helping me .Steve

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Last edited by pentaxk10duser; 08-09-2009 at 10:08 PM.

[Marc Sabatella]

You should say what program you are using - the image quality settings are different for each.

Anyhow, a good basic rule of thumb is to want enough pixels to be able to print at 300 pixels per inch. So to print 8x10, you'd need 8x300 = 2400 pixels by 10x300 = 3000 pixels. If the camera only has 2000x3000, that's close enough, but in any case, you probably don't need to resize your picture. On the other hand, you should consider how likely it is that you'd actually want to print 8x10's of a given picture - no sense in generating JPEG's that big unnecessarily, unless you are just swimming in hard disk space. I generally make JPEG's only of pictures I know I'll want to keep on my laptop, and only big enough for 4x6 at 300ppi (so, 1200x1800 pixels).

Meanwhile, the originals RAW gets saved, along with whatever processing I did on them, so if I do decide to print larger in the future, I can always go back to the RAW file and print from that, or generate a larger JPEG.

Anyhow, once the file is resized, I like to save with a pretty high quality - in the program I use, the scale is 1 to 100, and I use 85 for these JPEG's. These files are under 1 MB, so I can keep a lot of them on my laptop. The ones I print larger might get full size JPEG's at 90 quality, and those might be several MB in size (from my 10MP camera).

Note that setting the resolution *should* be unnecessary. If you've chosen an appropriate size in terms of actual pixel dimensions (like setting 1200x1800), the pixels per inch figure takes care of itself - it literally is pixels per inch. So if you've got 1200 pixels horizontally and print them at 4 inches, that's 1200 / 4 = 300 pixels per inch, period. On the other hand, if you try to print the same image at 6x9", it works out to 1200/6 = 200 pixels per inch. There is no need to worry about entering anything into any box labeled pixels per inch or dots per inch - that number is the *result* of the actual size of the image in pixels and the size at which you print it.

[davemdsn]

I don't even keep jpegs very often. I have just a few in my Pictures folder, but not many. I really only generate jpegs when sending an image to a print shop or to the web.

On the other hand, but raw workflow app does make jpeg previews of all my images with edits and I can pull those previews from anywhere on my computer and use them as desktop images or in slideshows when needed. Since I work on a notebook all of this stuff lives on an external hard drive so I do have to have that drive plugged in to access those previews, but when I'm at my desk it is plugged in all the time anyway.

Since my previews are roughly the same thing as having exported jpegs at a small size I will say that I have my previews set at my monitor resolution, which is 1680x1050, with quality at 10 on a scale that goes to 12. This size works well for anything I do on my own computer. When I am going to print them I go back to the original and export a larger version.

[pentaxk10duser]

Thanks Marc and dave for your help, that was what I wanted to know ,thanks for braking it down so it was easy to understand .