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Might Be Seen in the Delaware Art Museum

I am not one that highlights my achievements too much, and I am sure it has cost me some views over the years.

Anyhow, to start the story of this adventure off, one has to go back to early December, when I received an email with the subject of “Image of Brandywine”, and the following thumbnail image.

Fall (2011) image taken of the Brandywine River in Hibernia Park in Chester County PA.
Fall (2011) image taken of the Brandywine River in Hibernia Park in Chester County PA.

In the email, Margaretta said she was one of the curators at the Delaware Art Museum, and she was working with a exhibition designer, Keith, who had found my image online, and they were wondering if I would be interested in allowing the museum to use my image in a exhibition called “Eye on Nature“, comparing Andrew Wyeth and John Ruskin from March 10-27, 2018.

Also included with the email was a PDF file of proposed design layouts, and my image was already included, at a 11 feet by 17 feet!

After finishing the email, I had to walk around to catch my breath, and after a few minutes, I showed the email to my wife, and pointed to the address at the bottom.

Could this really be true?

The next day, I called the phone number provided, and the voicemail confirmed the name in the email, but I could only leave a message.

I did follow-up with an email, and the next day Margaretta followed up with a date and time to chat more about the exhibition.

As the day and time we agreed on, drew nearer, I was becoming more nervous, and when I finally made the call, I made sure that I had a large glass of water with me, so that I would not be too parched during the conversation.

Margaretta and I chatted for some time about the details of the exhibition, the exhibition designer and what I was looking for in compensation.

I remember blurting out a number, and I got the sense that I had blown the opportunity, but she responded back “Normally, I do not deal with living artists, but I’ll look into it.”

Internally, I giggled – “Normally, I do not deal with living artists…”

A couple of day pasted, and I had a change to speak with Keith the exhibition designer, and indeed confirmed the output size: 11 x 17 feet!

I told him of my printing background, but I had never dealt with anything of that size, but I knew of a technique that might allow me to get size required.

At this point, I was still not internally sure if I was in a dream or not, but after another phone call with Margaretta, and a couple days a waiting a check arrived from the museum!

My thought, “Hold S***, this is for REAL!!”

Now I had to start working on getting the image ready for Keith the exhibition designer.

At first, I corrected some image issues on the original image file that were cosmetic in nature because of my use of several images (ghosting), and then I began to tweak some of the various tones, basically reducing some of the ‘hot spots’, and eventually, I created the following image.

Image for the Delaware Art Museum - "Eye on Nature" - Andrew Wyeth/John Ruskin exhibition
Image for the Delaware Art Museum – “Eye on Nature” – Andrew Wyeth/John Ruskin exhibition

Now, the fun part… Getting the image to the right size… 11 x 17 feet…

I used the basic technique that I have outlined before (See my post “Fine Art prints done local“, section “Going Big”), but instead of 110%, I used 105%.

I created a Photoshop action, and repeated, and repeated until Photoshop crashed, and corrupted the image.

In troubleshooting the crash, I found out that I had filled my 128 GB SSD drive used for the Photoshop scratch/VM file! (My machine has 32 GBs of physical RAM)

In Photoshop, I re- targeted the scratch/VM file to one of my 4 TB hard drives and began the resizing again.

After numerous resizes, and quick “save-as” files, I finally reached 16.57 x 11.0 feet or 198.887 x 132.733 inches or 19889×13273 pixels (@300 dpi)!

Within the file, I still had a couple of correction layers, but the file size was approximately 19.2 GBs! By FAR the largest single file I have ever worked on, and had to save it a PSB file (See my post “Large Image Files – PSB vs TIFF“)

Note – Large PSB files are STILL not visible within Lightroom Classic CC, version 7.2. — Adobe, are you listening? It’s been 7+ years since I reported/blogged about this!

Any how, I created several different DPI files (and file size(s)):

  • 100 dpi psb – 565.487 MBs
  • 100 dpi tiff – 773.447 MBs
  • 150 dpi psb – 1,277.122 MBs
  • 150 dpi tiff – 1,740.209 MBs
  • 200 dpi psb – 2,455.681 MBs
  • 200 dpi tiff – 3,093.681 MBs
  • 300 dpi psb – 5,212.382 MBs

and placed them on my FTP server for Keith to download.

Note – For those techno-geeks, PSB creates significantly smaller files, when compared to TIFF, but as mentioned above, Lightroom STILL can not produce thumbnails within light room.

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Adobe Blogging Clean Up Photography Reference Software Tech Talk Tips

Playing with a 10.6+ GB File!

This morning, I started to “stitch” together a panoramic photo that I had taken the other day in Dowlin Forge Park, right here in Downingtown.

It is a series of (28) Canon RAW files (cr2) that were taken with a Canon T5i/700D, imported into Lightroom 5.3, and merged into a straightforward panorama image in Photoshop CS 6.

I knew this was going to be a large file from previous experience, but I have not tried yet to really push my new computer setup, so…

The actual merge of the (28) 16-bit files took about 3-4 minutes, which was A LOT better than last time, where I had to break-up the (42) files into groups of 10, merge them into one file, and repeat until all the files were merged.

Once the merged file was in Photoshop, with all 28 layers showing, my new machine was not even breathing too hard.  Even with Lightroom and several Chrome instances, I was still only pushing 85% physical RAM and the CPU spiked at 15%!

From there, I tried to “Save As” a Standard Adobe PSD, and got the standard error dialog, showing the 2GB file size limitation.

Nothing new there…

Then I tried a “Save As” as an Adobe TIFF file, and this time the computer took a great deal longer, 5+ minutes, before there was an error, and during that time, Photoshop created a 10.6+ GB file tmp!

10.6 GB Adobe TMP file
10.6 GB Adobe TMP file

To date, this is the single largest file that I have “Saved” in Photoshop!

Finally, I tried saving the file as a Standard Adobe PSB file, which is still a large file at 3.3+ GBs!

Main Adobe PSB file w/o Flatten
Main Adobe PSB file w/o Flatten

Time to Flatten some Layers!

With the Main PSB file open, I Flattened the Layers into 1, and did a “Save As” a PSB and then Re-Opened the Main PSB file, Flattened, and “Save As” again as TIFFs, and was very happy to see both files sizes were nearly identical at 638 MBs!

Comparison when Flattened
Comparison when Flattened

Conclusion

I conducted this test mostly out of personal curiosity and to see if files have remained consistent since the last time I did this experiment.

I expected the file size to go up, mainly because I was using 27-28 MB files created with the Canon T5i/700D vs 8-9 MB files with the Canon XTi.

If I were to estimate, the same 46 shoots done in 2011 could easily reach 6 GBs as a PSB file, and maybe create a 20-30 GB temp file at the same time.

Be sure that you have enough scratch disk space before you start.

It should be obvious that if you know a file is going to reach over 4 GBs, save it out as a PSB and go from there in the rest of your workflow.

The current maximum file file for an Adobe PSB is 4 exabytes – 300,000 x 300,000 pixels – 350 x 350 feet, which should keep you.

It is also nice to see that after Flattening, both PSB and TIFF files appear to be the same size.

Personally, I would keep the TIFF files, mostly because TIFF is NOT a proprietary file format, and in the future, if I want to move the file into another program, it will be easier.

Although I wrote my first post on PSB vs TIFF several years ago, I have yet to find out what IS all the Un-Saved data?

Duplicate “colors?” Non-Human readable code?

If you happen to know, please let me know.

I’m just very curious!

And finally, it should be noted, just like last time, the 2 PSB files do NOT show up in Lightroom, so you have to remember that they are there.

The TIFF file that was created, after Flattening all the Layers, DOES show up in Lightroom.

Adobe Bridge CS6 (5.0.2.4 x64) is able to show the Flattened PSB and TIFF, but NOT the larger Un-Flattened 3.3+ GB PSB file.

Hope you enjoyed my little file size observations.

If you have any questions or answers, please let me know!!

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Categories
Adobe How to(s)? Information Photography Reference Software Tips

Large Image Files – PSB vs TIFF

In this post, I am going to explore some basic differences between the various Photoshop file formats: PSD, TIFF and PSB

I’m working on a very large image, and it is a panorama of (42) 10 MP captures, each between 8-10 MBs, merged into Photoshop CS5.1.

Photoshop CS 5.1 can not save anything over 2.0 GBs as a PSD file…

Photoshop CS 5.1 - 2 GB File Size error message
Photoshop CS 5.1 – 2 GB File Size error message

The TIFF file is 3.7 GBs…

File Properties - TIFF
File Properties – TIFF

and the PSB file is 2.7 GBs…

File Properties - PSB
File Properties – PSB

Open Questions

In this example above, there is approximately 1 GB (25%) loss in file size…

Where did it go?

  • File compress?
  • Color Data?
  • File Optimization?

Findings

  • Photoshop PSD (max) file size: 2 GBs
  • Photoshop PSB (max) file size: 4 exabytes (300,000 x 300,000 pixels – 350 x 350 feet)
  • TIFF (max) file size: 4 GBs

Observations

  • Lightroom is not “seeing” my 2.7 GB PSB file, but is “seeing” the 3.7 GB TIFF.

References

anyone got any ideas?

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