Photomechanic Users (the quality slider)

[monkeyleader]

Morning all,

When using Photomechanic and exporting your JPEGs do you make use of the quality slider along with maximum file size (or just use one or the other)? When reading the blurb it would seem that by using the quality slider set to anything under say 50 you are potentially hurting yourself in regards to image quality. I've personally not noticed this and in fact if I set a maximum file size of say 3MB and then set quality slider to 50% the image size will quite often be greater than 3MB, especially when the original JPEG coming from the camera was large, to begin with (say a D5, 11MB) ...

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[Tony101]

My understanding is - the Quality slider and Limit file size setting both work together.

So if you set Quality at 50 and limit the file size to 3MB (as in your example), Photo Mechanic will only save to 3MB if it can do so without going lower than the Quality of 50 which you've specified.

If the 3MB filesize is the most important criteria, you can set the Quality to 0 and PM will save the JPEGs to the best quality possible while maintaining the 3MB file size.

Obviously if the image is too large, or the subject extremely complex (which would result in larger file sizes) the Quality may drop to a level that delivers unsatisfactory results.

A little experimentation would be useful.

To maintain the 3MB file size with satisfactory results, you may have to reduce the image size.

I hope that makes some sort of vague sense.

Cheers!
Tony