Do JPEGs Reduce Print Quality? Updated!

[@MattBishopPhotography]

Interesting discussion. A subject that often comes up with who appreciates printing at a high grade level. After years I have broken it down into 2 export modes. TIFF 16BIT proPhoto for printing. Jpeg srgb for digital media. Thanks a lot for the time and effort into the subject

[@nevvanclarke9225]

Hi Matt, I saw your comment. I noticed that Lightroom now does 32 bit tiff files which I printed one the other day and it looked amazing. I don't exactly know all of the tech data that goes into printing. I'm not a scientist feel like you need to be a scientist, understand it, but they look amazing.

[@lyfandeth]

We (a batch of bleeding edge folks) went through this maybe 35 years ago with dpi, spi, supercells, imagesetter resolutions of 3600 dpi versus lasers at 300 dpi...and if the printing equipment can handle it, the bit depth and dpi can never be too high. Low res and eight bit, eventually will show up.

[@nicholasdegarmo2415]

After all your work, prints and time a thumbs up seems pretty minimal! Thanks for all your efforts!

[@amaly76]

Some great pointers here - good to know that Adobe jpeg could still preserve a good amount of image quality for print.

[@Anonymous-it5jw]

Great, useful comparison prints. On the 16 bit and 8 bit forest pictures, while the color gamut was comparable, there appeared to be a loss of detail when going from 16 bit to 8 bit. Thanks for taking the time and effort to clarify the issue of the possibility of seeing banding when printing JPEG images.

[@KenToney]

I always print from my 16bit Tiffs

[@steve2085]

Thanks for sharing this, Sean.

[@mipmipmipmipmip-v5x]

I just make mediocre photos for own use, no post-processing. Seeing your results I'll try printing jpg, save myself time but still get physical prints 😀 Will set adobeRBG in my cameras to get most out of the jpg workflow, thanks!

[@marcelduvenage3289]

Tiff all the way for prints. If you zoom in on jpg vs tiff you will definitely see the difference. For me, shoot Raw, edit and export as Tiff. The print people sometimes say they just want a jpg but I insist on Tiffs. I come from a design background and saw the difference in print quality right away. Anyhow thanks for the excellent explanation..

[@thomastuorto9929]

Thanks for the vid. What printer/ printers do you use at home. Thanks for any replies.

[@SeanBagshaw]

My current printer is the Canon Pro-1000

[@ElMundoDuro]

I assume the comparisons were done with .jpg files at 100% quality? I am also curious if banding is a conversion issue rather than an issue with the format it has been converted to. Does it depends on which program does the conversion? Also does banding show up more or less based on what the source material is? Some suggest the Human eye can see around 1 million colors, so the 16 million colors of an 8 bit .jpg should be sufficient for most humans right?

[@SeanBagshaw]

All good questions. I use Photoshop so that's what I did the conversions with. I guess it's possible other apps would give different results? It does depend on the source material. Smooth gradients and high saturation show the most banding. I think it isn't just about the total number of colors, but how smoothly the transition from one color to the next color can be made.

[@davidewersphotography1013]

The science teacher still lives

[@SeanBagshaw]

🤣🤣

[@ashtonhennigar-shuh6054]

What printer do you have to print the tif files my dad needs a printer for home that has a printer with a tif option

[@ashtonhennigar-shuh6054]

…or a printer with a save and print as tif option to print out documents etc.

[@SeanBagshaw]

I think just about any printer can print a tif file. Canon and Epson photo printers certainly can.

[@ashtonhennigar-shuh6054]

Ok so my dad is now looking for a printer for home that has the capability to scan into a tif file

[@ashtonhennigar-shuh6054]

…any brands and printer models to suggest?

[@BugbugAdventures]

Thanks for the tip :)

[@GarthMurray1]

OK, saving a Jpeg file in the Prophoto color space?? I always thought an 8 bit Jpeg file had to be in the srgb color space. I'm missing something. How can an 8 bit file format store such a wide color space? And why have I never heard of this in any discussions about color spaces or file formats? Are you a wizard? 🧙‍♂️

[@451804]

Hey Sean, Interesting indeed as I have been doing some printing at home and sending out to MagCloud PDF's for magazine style printing. What this has to do with your printing might raise another wrinkle or two. Essentially, my invisible problem was using Affinity Software, which produced PDFs that were unexpectedly massive. Research informed me that this was not expected, and I found some colorspace conversion settings that had to be tweeked. I was confused because these were fully edited images, exported to JPEGs and imported to the publisher then exported to PDF. Every step from the JPEG export on was sRGB. ? - ????? the heck? So, I broke down after 20 years and have gone full CC suite. Relearning curve, and I have to get back to Ps and TK... The result of InDesign exports was a PDF only 10% the size of the Affinity created PDF. Image Quality for this type of print cannot be distinguished. So, why would these programs in various stages generate desperately different file sizes? Was it all colorspace info? And then you said something that got me thinking. If you start with profoto or adobe colorspace and convert to SRGB well, what did you expect? I think the input colorspace, the program used in the conversion, and to some final export colorspace and bit depth are all INTER-related. I've seen this with JPEG SOOC vs exported JPEGs, no banding in camera, banding after conversion. I think it's all like pulling a piece of silk rope through a backyard clothesline pully --- like re-compressing JPEGS but BIDirectionally .... Dennis

[@SeanBagshaw]

Wow. Not sure why Afinity would generate such large PDFs. That’s outside my wheelhouse. Hard to know what’s going on behind the curtain sometimes.

[@ReneMasson]

Sorry, I simply do not understand what you are trying to do. FYI : no monitor today can display a ProphotoRBG, only a few can display an AdobeRGB and then again many can display only a 90-95% of the full AdobeRGB color space. Therefore what you see on your monitor screen is ??? A color space that has been converted / modified by LR or PS in a way that, of course, it showing problems… You have similar issues when printing. No printer is able to print ProphotoRGB, and only a a few brand new printers can support a full AdobeRGB…. And then again CMYK most often used or printers is far less than all color spaces that you use on a monitor, either sRGB or AdobeRGB.

[@terryhopkins8059]

Great video thanks..! Now I would like you to talk about HEIF vs JPEG..!

[@SeanBagshaw]

Thanks! Unfortunately, I don't have any experience or knowledge with HEIF.

[@chiragkotian4280]

Hi Sean, I have an image of a wall that I have captured through my nikon d800. I want to print this image in poster size i.e 24inch X36inch and resolution would be around 300dpi. Any suggestions on how I should prepare/enlarge this image in Photoshop

[@SeanBagshaw]

Hi Chirag. In Photoshop: 1. duplicate and flatten your image. 2. Go to Image>Image Size. 3. In the Image Size window, check the Resample box and select Automatic from the menu. 4. Enter 300 for the ppi. 5. Enter 24 and 36 for height and width. 6. Click OK and your image will be sized as you wanted it.

[@BrianMarcWhittaker]

Very helpful information.

[@SeanBagshaw]

Glad it was helpful!

[@leighlangley7266]

Hi Sean, I bought your editing for print video and was just wondering if changing the 300dpi would help with this? BayPhoto requires 8 bit and their new Epic prints are at 610dpi. One of their pages says they take ProPhoto and another says only Adobe 1998 or srgb. Kinda confusing. One course for printing I tried recommended lowering the dpi if you were printing big but it seems that’s not really the case?

[@SeanBagshaw]

This is a bit depth problem, so it would not affected by print resolution as far as I know. I agree that Bay Photo info is confusing. Lowering ppi for larger prints is old methodology from back before image upsizing software was as good as it is now.

[@nevvanclarke9225]

I have done lots of comparisons interestingly if I print a black and white image or one that's very moody, virtually no difference at all, but I also shoot some landscapes with sunset sometimes two, and I did notice with orange and red colours that the tiff file definitely produced a better image I'm going to stick with tiff because I just feel logically that it has more data in the file. It's a bigger file so what is in that big a file well I'm not an expert on that but I'm just going with the logic that because the file is bigger, there is more data in that file, hence You get a better image in my experience. Probably about 80% of tiff files produce better images

[@senior_ranger]

If I ever make a print for you, I'll keep this in mind. Otherwise...