interesting, informative and ....

important blog - especially for LR users but also for anybody who ever saved a jpg and scratched his head while pondering where to put the Quality slider.

http://regex.info …room-goodies/jpeg-quality

That's a good one, Elie!

Quite some time ago I settled on the 70-75 range for my all-purpose use such as uploading to my Web galleries because my host does not restrict size -- I can upload a POTN-size image at Quality 70 and I've found this is great for no artifacts/banding and whatnot.

So, this blog does at least show validity in that practice, which is a "warm and fuzzy" monent!

Edit: I should say the sunset and bridge shots were super useful in showing banding and the weird artifacts around the sun in the bridge shot.

Now the things that challenge me is the concept that 1) for shots full of detail do I really want to go down to something like 10 or 20? and 2) Do I believe that I could get as good of a large format print with my quality down to 70?

For the first (high detail), I already lower the setting a bit once a file size gets around 500k and that seems to work fine, but I don't recall going that low.

For the large prints, wow, I guess I'll have to really examine things closely, 'cause I'd be nervous about printing large and regretting it! Actually, I do virtually all my printing through LR directly up to 13" x 19" but I'd hate so send off for a 20"x30" print presuming that my setting of 70 was as good as I needed.

Has anyone done some research along this lines for large printing and whether there is a "sweet spot" for best but not wasteful?

I must admit that unless constrained by site requirements, I have always put the slider on 100% - according to the principle "if a little is good, a lot will be better." But now I will put it down to 75 for my web gallery. I also print directly from LR but I guess I will continue to use 100 for big lab prints - if I'm spending the money I might as well spend the band width also.

Did you see the long and knowledgeable sounding comment at the bottom of the page on the transition in compression methods at 54 in LR and 51 in PS. Sounds like a good idea to try to always be above that.

That's very interesting. I've pretty much always used either 100 or 75, (which seemed to give good compression with minimal visual loss), depending on the circumstances.

Thanks for pointing out that comment towards the end, I had to try the little experiment, fascinating.

tzalman wrote in post #10539924
I must admit that unless constrained by site requirements, I have always put the slider on 100% - according to the principle "if a little is good, a lot will be better." But now I will put it down to 75 for my web gallery. I also print directly from LR but I guess I will continue to use 100 for big lab prints - if I'm spending the money I might as well spend the band width also.

Did you see the long and knowledgeable sounding comment at the bottom of the page on the transition in compression methods at 54 in LR and 51 in PS. Sounds like a good idea to try to always be above that.

It sounds like we've been on the same page, except I landed on the 70-76 for the Web gallery quite some time ago. It just seems to work very well.

As far as some lower threshold, well, I'll have to play with that. My "default" works for everything but the least demanding. But once in a while I do upload directly from the computer to POTN and then I scale back to within the limits.