I got a question the other day about upsizing a photo. They asked if I liked Super Resolution or Image Size in Photoshop better. I answered that I prefer the Image > Image Size option in Photoshop but that it’s easy enough to try both and see what you would prefer. They replied and said they tried the Super Resolution feature, but it creates a very large DNG and they didn’t like that.
My response was, if you like that feature, why let the size of the file it creates stop you. Why would you need to save that huge DNG file it creates. Instead, why not just use the feature you want. Do whatever it is you need to do with file (in this case I’m assuming a print since there’s little reason for large upsizing elsewhere). Then delete the huge file it created. If you need to make another print, you can always go back and do it again.
But I think we’re making our photography life harder sometimes, by thinking we need to save everything “just in case”. We do all of these things just in case one day we ever want to go back to that image. In reality, very few of us ever do.
Real Life Example
Back in June I went to Alaska to photograph bears. When I got back, I had about 50 photos that I really liked from the trip that made it to my keepers. I wanted to write a blog post recapping the trip to share some photos and part of my editing process for those photos was Lightroom’s DeNoise AI feature (which creates large DNG files).
So here’s what I did. I edited the files and then I batch processed those 50 photos for Noise Reduction (it takes a while so I went and did something else at the time). Then, I saved those 50 photos as JPGs, put them on my blog and in to my “Portfolio” folder and deleted the 50 large DNG files that the DeNoise AI created.
I’d challenge anyone to tell me (as a hobbyist who doesn’t need instantaneous access to those photos at a split second) how this would be a poor workflow. If for some reason I ever wanted to share the photo again, I have my Portfolio folder (I wrote more about that here), that I can look to and grab the JPG again. And if for some reason I ever really needed the original, it’ll take me 60 seconds to re-run DeNoise AI on the raw file and do it again.
All I’m trying to get you to realize is to forget all of the typical things you’ve learned about photo management. I believe a lot of them came from professional photographers who had very different needs than most of you reading this do. Instead, maybe Keep it simple. And use common sense. Of course if I’ve spent 30 minutes editing a photo with layers in Photoshop and it produces a large PSD/TIFF file after – I’m probably not going to just delete that file because if I ever did need it again it would cost me another 30 minutes.
But if something caused you to have a large file, and you then shared/produced/printed/whatever that large file how you needed to, and you don’t plan on needing to go back to it often, consider deleting it and simplifying things a bit. Like I said… common sense. If it makes sense for you go for it. If what I just wrote doesn’t don’t do it. It’s just that simple 🙂
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
Matt, I’m trying to understand and learn how to backup my PS files, To the Cloud?, Other?
Thank you, I couldn’t find a search function on your site to look for help backing up!
Bob
If you keep your software up to date, you’ll be able to edit the file better and faster at a later date so the original edit may no longer have much value anyway!
WARNING: I am a pure amateur. Not sure it matters, but I shoot mostly birds. I shoot Sony ARW and the raw files average around 70 MB. In my current workflow I copy the ARW files to a folder; I use Adobe Bridge to cull obviously unneeded/unwanted photos; I import the remaining photos into Lightroom Classic. I sometimes do another cull in LrC. I back up the remaining originals.
I then edit the remaining photos in Topaz Photo AI. That almost always entails clipping to the desired aspect ratio and rough size (currently at least Photo AI does not recognize any clipping done in LrC). It can include scaling (rarely over 2X, noise reduction, sharpening, or all three, depending on the photo. That produces a DNG file which can easily be larger than the original ARW.
In LrC I then begin the “improvement” of the remaining photos. For almost 100% of my photos, I define at least two mask, one for the bird and another for the background. I sometimes use additional masks to achieve the desired composition. I probably spend too much time creating the masks, using subject or object(s) and brushes, and sometimes gradients and ranges. I suspect this creates a large presence in the catalog history. And at this point, I could easily have an hour invested in one edited photo. Currently I back up the edited photos.
I don’t create JPG files until I’m ready to print, and I find that I often print a minority of the edited photos. I have backed up the majority of the JPG files, but I admit that I’ve not backed up all of them due to the fact that is very easy to recreate the JPG files.
I think I’m probably violating your “keep it simple” suggestion, but I am not sure. I seem to remember in another blog or post you suggested you (generally?) only consider your JPG files important. So, I wonder if you have some suggestions that would simplify my workflow and reduce the amount of storage for photos and the LrC catalog.
Thanks.
Hi Greg. I’m not sure what you could spend an hour on with a bird photo but that would be a place to start to simplify. Unless you just enjoy the time, which is a totally fine answer. I enjoy editing, but at the same time spending an hour on a photo isn’t personally enjoyable to me.
Aside from that, the only thing you can do to simplify is if you like wildlife… delete the photos you don’t need. One photo of a series of the wildlife doing something is good enough. We generally don’t need to save the 100 that were before it and the 100 that came after 🙂 Thanks!
I appreciate your feedback! The majority of my editing time is usually spent getting a workable separation between the bird and the background with masks. I also used to spend a lot of time getting rid of distractions, but I’ve learned that that is generally a lot of work and have cut back on the practice. Overall, I am getting a bit faster with experience. Funny you should mention sequences. I got my first “sequence capable” camera in 2018, and I’ve captured several flying bird sequences since. With one exception, you are correct, one photo is all I need. Thanks again.
With Topaz DeNoise, Sharpen, Gigapixel I would start with a Sony Lossless Compressed RAW 14 bit file. The software would change to uncompressed 16 bit file, and 2x upscale would make the file 4x larger.
With Topaz Photo AI large intermediate files would not have to be saved. The saved file might be upscaled and cropped.
Matt, you have made so many valid points. I will be looking at the size of my files and doing some deleting. Thanks for the logical discussion.
Guilty!
Thank you! I am guilty of saving photos “just in case”. I will definitely revisit my files and clean them up!
For my better photos edit them to produce a tiff file without layers that I label as a master and use as a source for printing etc. In the process I might create intermediary files some of which may be large and contain Photoshop layers. I label these as edit files and initially I keep them. I frequently look back at photos after a short period and think perhaps I should have done this or not done that and so can tweak the edit files to suit. But after a year I delete the old edit files. I figure that after a year I won’t need them any more as software I used may have moved on or my ideas on editing may have changed. It has never caused me any problems.
My images are stored in an internal SSD. A backup is made to an external HD with a copy going of-site. That is three copies of each image with two of those to somewhat expensive storage. I am considering creating an archive of large photos that I want to keep just incase, but will probably never be required. For that I may use my backup drive or an old drive that is no longer being used.
Makes perfect sense.
Also, next time you might need that photo and you put it into super resolution or image size, those apps might actually be better or year or two down the road. My two cents.
Thanks Matt.
Matt I think we save large files because in Photoshop after you edited you saved your work. That’s why I went to Lightroom no saving large files. I liked the idea of saving to jpg and deleting the dng’s. This was a great tip thanks
I have not used LR denoise much because it more time in creating the dng files. I very happy with what I get from the Topaz software.
You can also burn to a CD or DVD, even if it is just a single image. Pretty cheap, portable and can’t be “lost” to some computer memory malfunction.
I suppose. Though I haven’t had a computer that could read a CD or DVD in years – let alone burn one?
CDs and DVDs degrade after a few years (and don’t really hold many Photoshop images)
They fail after years, I wouldn’t trust disks.
Okay, I’m not sure how this works but I know the photos that I’ve loaded into Lightroom are taking up a huge amount of room on my computer. Can I just delete all of those files because I’ve kept the ones that I want to keep for good in a high quality JPEG. I usually keep one without my watermark, and one with. I have three and a half years worth of photos saved in Lightroom on my computer. My computer is slowing down as the hard drive only has 100 GB left.
You are best off moving your images to an external, large capacity SSD drive. I would recommend a 2TB drive as it should hold your current library of images. You can move them using LR so that app will keep track of where they are.