My watercolor papers are made of many layers, and also have a texture applied to it. Of course after saving the file as a JPEG, the file size is rather large. I flatten the file before saving, but I'm just not sure how to reduce the file size and still maintain the clarity. Do you have any suggestions? Each watercolor paper is approximately 12MB in size...........
I love creating watercolor papers, so I would hate to stop designing them because the files are too large to download.........
What do you have your compression level set to? 10 is usually fine as far as quality and will reduce the file size dramatically. I've rarely had a watercolor graphic go over 7mb and I make them pretty often.
Thanks for your response, Rose. I haven't been using compression, I guess I thought that it would have a negative impact on the quality of the papers, but I tried 10%, and it reduced the file size to just over 7MB. At 20%, I couldn't see a difference either, and that reduced the file size to just over 5MB.
I'll stick with the 10% and go from there. Again, thank you for your input.
Hi Sunny,
Something to think about when it comes to jpg. Each time a jpg is saved or a save as is done the quality is reduced.
When you do a compression on a jpg, it looks for sections of the same color. Even if there is texture there. It will remove some or all of the texture and list the area as being one flat color. It does reduce the quality. Sometimes not seen until it is printed.
Have you tried to save it in a different format? PNG or TIFF.
Another point have you thought about offering two different file sizes. This will let the end user chose which one they want to download. I always chose the original size over the smaller file size that has been compressed. I do know it does take up more space on your server and time to set up the different options, but it may be worth it.
With today's options of saving to external drives space is not a problem anymore.
Thank you for the thoughts, Judy. I shall offer the two different file sizes for download, in the future. (I had saved my paper as a PNG, but it was the same size as the JPG. Have not tried a TIFF, so that may be another option.)
You're welcome, Sunny. I've never had a visible loss in image quality at 10. My rule of thumb is to compress as little as possible but enough so that my graphics will be within the limits on a site like this. Sometimes I offer larger sizes on my website, like Judy suggested.
Thank you both!
Personally I save at the highest quality possible for printing needs and yes, sometimes the files are large but the quality makes it worth it