Reduce Your Photoshop Workload With JPEGmini
As photographers, we spend a lot of time with our cameras. It’s our weapon of choice. We spend the majority of our days capturing the brilliance in everything we do. After a long shoot, we usually head back to our headquarters where we start the editing process. We go from immersing ourself in the photo shoot to immersing ourself inside Photoshop. Once we’re fully immersed in Photoshop, we make sure to optimize, tweak, adjust and make sure our end result looks awesome when it hits the web. But is your photo really optimized for the web?
Using the “Save for Web” feature in Photoshop on each image isn’t really time efficient. When you first go into the Save for Web feature, the default quality is the preset “JPEG High”. You can change the quality level, and compare the “Original” and “Optimized” photos unit you are satisfied with the quality. But this “manual” optimization of photos is really time consuming. Even if you do choose a higher quality setting in photoshop, did you know that it sometimes reduces the image quality? According to Michael Zhang, “don’t ever use a quality of 7 when saving JPEGs with Photoshop. Either use 6, or something higher than 7 if you want to actually increase the quality of the photo.”
Do you really want to do that for each and every photo that you have? JPEGmini’s main advantage is that it does automatic optimization of images, with no human intervention required. It’s so simple! Just drag a bunch of images onto the app, and it optimizes each one of them to the lowest size possible, while guaranteeing that the perceptual quality of the image is never affected. This is what we call an “always-safe” process.
Our recommendation when using Photoshop and JPEGmini would be to resize and edit in Photoshop to your desired web image size dimensions. Next, save the photo in high quality in Photoshop. Finally, use JPEGmini to automatically optimize each photo to the lowest file size possible while retaining that high quality. This will produce high quality web images that download quickly, which your users will love!
Are you ready to reduce your Photoshop workload? Please share your thoughts in the comments section or on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook where we are always listening.
21 Comments
You don’t have to process each photo individually. For my workflow, I use Lightroom to manage the photos and edit in PS when required. Once complete I export the photos twice, once full size in high quality for print/archive. The second export is for the web, resized to a smaller size (usually 2048), and a different folder. I then run a Photoshop Action on the whole folder and it will batch convert all photos in the folder using the “save for web” option (no resize). I tested this against jpegmini, and the end result is actually a smaller file with PS and it’s faster. If someone doesn’t have Photoshop, jpegmini is the way to go but for me PS works better.
What many people don’t know is that there is a quirk in the way that Photoshop defines its quality range. […] Quality level 6 is the last point in which chroma subsampling is used. At Quality level 7 and higher, no chroma subsampling is used at all. With the amount of color information encoded now doubled, the file size would have naturally increased significantly at this level versus the previous level.
However, it is likely that Adobe decided to allocate the various quality levels with some relationship to the final compressed file size. Therefore, Adobe chose a poorer luminance and chrominance compression quality (i.e. higher level of compression) in Quality level 7 than Quality level 6! What this means is that the image quality of Quality level 7 is actually lower than Quality level 6.
I own licence for JPEGmini and latest Photoshop. For the sake of this discussion I tested demanding picture for compression. Exported RAW as TIFF and 99% JPEG out from Lightroom, than reduced JPG with JPEGmini, and TIFF saved in Photoshop as “Save for web”. Than I immported all this images back to lightroom and made white balance and lighten shadows and lover highlights, as I do to most pictures I make.
Results:
1) The best is of course RAW – only fine grain is visible in shadows, but no trace of truncating colors. Plenty of details there and color information. I could lighten them much much further.
2) JPEG 99% – almost same as RAW, only overal colorshift and slight change of darkness in shadows. Fine grain is still visible, further editing in Lr does not braeak image.
3) JPEGmini – When did standard edits as I described, picture shows all damage in shadows. Truncated colors and mush less details can be seen, almost no grain visible.
4) Photoshop Save for web at HIGH setting (60). details in shadows are even further ruined. But file is 60% of JPEGmini.
4b) Photoshop at same file size as JPEGmini (73 for particular image) – PS is closer now, not so bad as with 60, but JPEGmini still give much much FINER result compared to Ps.
File sizes:
RAW (DNG 4288 x 2848) = 9,39MB
99% JPEG = 3,79MB
JPEGmini = 1,03MB
PS S.f.W. @73 = 1,09MB
PS S.f.W. @60 = 645kb
I think ALL theese files are perfectly good for WEB, until you export FINAL developed versions. If you apply “optimization” on final version before uploading. For any kind of later editing ORIGINAL is only right decision. Let it be 99% export from RAW or original JPEG at “super fine” setting in camera.
But considering JPEGmini is much more refined at heavy compression than PS and PRO version of plugin can export DIRECTLY from Lightroom, it was enough reason for me to buy licence. I would like that JPEGmini would have different settings to (great, medium, low). Because for really lovest size Ps is the way to go. But already “medium” setting in PS start to show blocking even at normal lit parts of image, so size reduction beyond JPEGmini does get with price.
Wow i have not tried this before but now getting curious to use it once, will start with free trial first. Thank you anyway for the free trial version.
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That’s a great article containing tips to reduce the workload of photoshop. Now a day we all need to take the help of photoshop. So, this is a nice tip to have in mind. Thanks a lot for recommending the JPEGmini. It’s a great help. I really loved the way you have expressed yourself and written the article. Thanks a lot again. Looking forward for more tips from you.