Comments on: An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings

By: Diwa

Diwa — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:37:23 +0000

Thanks so much Jeffrey! Very useful. Now I can save a ton more disk space. Any thoughts on the Pixels per inch setting in Lightroom? Mine defaults to 240ppi. Are you aware of any thorough comparisons for ppi like yours above? PPI makes sense only in the context of a print when sizing by non-pixel units, and so it depends greatly on the printer. —Jeffrey

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:52:32 +0000

Thanks for this info. It’s super informative and is saving me time, upload bandwidth and disk space. I used to blindly archive my stuff at 100% quality for no reason. I always save the raws and LR catalogs on my external hard drive so 100% quality is overkill.

By: Fletch

Fletch — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:43:32 +0000

I’m having some kind of problems exporting from Lightroom 4. The image will look fine in Lightroom, but when I export to .tiff or .jpeg it doesn’t look the same in the default Windows Photo Viewer or in my web browser. There seems to be some kind of chromatic noise in the darker areas.
Strangely, the same jpeg or tiff looks fine in either Faststone Image Viewer or Irfanview. So, I’m not really sure why.

I’m saving as sRGB

Nothing particular comes to mind… the only thing I can think of is perhaps a bad display profile is causing stangeness in some apps? —Jeffrey

By: Cam Johnston

Cam Johnston — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 02:19:28 +0000

This was awesome. New to LR, this whole site is great
PS – Canada

By: Rinus Alewijnse

Rinus Alewijnse — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 10:14:11 +0000

In response to Bruce: that was also my point 3 month’s agoo, but Jeffrey did not respond.

However, it would be a very tuff and expensive job for him (and for all of us) to compare the subtle quality differences in large prints due to the amount of jpeg-compression.

As a simple rule of thumb, you can multiply your MP’s by 3 and then divide by 5 to get an average value for the jpeg-filesize in MB you need for perfect large prints (ca. 10 MB for a 16 MP camera).

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:21:17 +0000

Thank you for the interesting explanation. I’m wondering if a more salient comparison would be between large prints (e.g., 16×24) made from JPEGs at different quality settings. That has been my primary motivation in providing customers access to the largest files possible.

By: Marcus Roque

Marcus Roque — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 14:18:16 +0000

Wow Jeffrey, What a incredible study! Extremely helpful and very well made. Thank you, big time! For prints I’m using 92 and for anything else 75.

Cheers!

Marcus

By: Jan R

Jan R — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 18:00:24 +0000

Hello!

Good article. Since a couple of weeks I use LR4 to export my web galleries (via the SimpleViewer Pro template).

I just want to mention that I found out, that Photoshop “Save for web…” produces sharper AND smaller JPEGs than LR4. So maybe a nice follow up article could be to compare 2-3 common apps and their JPEG result (image quality & filesize).

Regards, Jan
(Hamburg, Germany)

By: Bernie

Bernie — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 21:41:40 +0000

Thanks for this Jeffrey!

It made the creation of my “dire-emergency-recovery-backup-folder” very easy, effective, and efficient! Everything >2 star is getting exported at 77*

*Of course I had to add +02 to the lightroom default to tell myself that “my” super refined pics require a little something more… besides just more “editing”

-Bern

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:25:54 +0000

Thanks for the info! Very useful and clear presentation!

Paul Lawrence / Alaska