Export issues help needed (warning - potentially stupid question!!!)

[Greggry P]

Hey everyone - I’m fairly inexperienced when it comes to the exporting element of AD so apologies in advance if I’m asking a stupid question.

I’m entering a competition next week, and need to upload my submission in JPEG form through the “Zealous” website. They have a maximum image size of 4mb, and the minumum file size I get when I export presently is 70.4mb (it’s quite a large and complex piece with a great many layers).

Weirdly, if I export using super jpeg its 12.5mb (smaller?)

I obviously want to export my image at the highest possible quality I can, so does anyone have any tips on how I might be blue to export/compress with minimum loss of quality?

Any assistance would be hugely appreciated.

[walt.farrell]

The number of layers shouldn't matter, as JPG files do not have layers; they are just pixels.

Questions:

1. What is the color format of your image? RGB/8, or /16, or /32?
2. What are the pixel dimensions?
3. What is the DPI?
4. What Quality setting did you choose in the Export options?

[R C-R]

In a JPEG, you can't have high quality, lots of fine-scale details, & lots of pixels if you want to keep the file size small. So one way or another, you have to compromise, like by doing some combination of removing fine details that make the file hard to compress, reducing the pixel dimensions, & increasing the compression by lowering the quality factor.

[Old Bruce]

22 hours ago, Greggry P said:

I’m entering a competition next week, and need to upload my submission in JPEG form through the “Zealous” website. They have a maximum image size of 4mb, and the minumum file size I get when I export presently is 70.4mb (it’s quite a large and complex piece with a great many layers).

What are the Pixel dimensions of the Designer document and also the JPEG which is exported. It may be that you have a file that is too large in Pixels.

[R C-R]

27 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

It may be that you have a file that is too large in Pixels.

FWIW, that's what I meant about having "lots of pixels" making it hard to achieve small JPEG file sizes while maintaining high quality.

BTW, somewhere I seem to remember a post or Spotlight article or some such, I think by @MEB, that discussed various ways to make documents easier to export to JPEG without losing much noticeable quality, but I can't find it now.

[v_kyr]

23 hours ago, Greggry P said:

I’m entering a competition next week, and need to upload my submission in JPEG form through the “Zealous” website. They have a maximum image size of 4mb, and the minumum file size I get when I export presently is 70.4mb (it’s quite a large and complex piece with a great many layers).

Well their competition rules usually tell the needed image specifications from start up, here is one such competition as an example. - So in your case, 4 MB would be just 5.68% in size of your actual 70,4 MB (100%) and you won't be able to reduce a doc's size which initially exports as an ~70 MB JPG here, then further so much via JPG export options & better compression ratios down to just ~4 MB, without immense/massive quality & pixel data losts. - You have to alter your whole doc settings acordingly in order to reduce it's exporting file size to be finally in the range of ~4 MB.

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

BTW, somewhere I seem to remember a post or Spotlight article or some such, I think by @MEB, that discussed various ways to make documents easier to export to JPEG without losing much noticeable quality, but I can't find it now.

Well my favourite trick is to apply a tiny amount of Gaussian Blur before exporting. On the order of 0.1 to 0.3 pixels. Obviously this is done to a Pixel layer made by Merging the Visible and exporting that blurred Pixel layer. The savings in file size can be quite large.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Well my favourite trick is to apply a tiny amount of Gaussian Blur before exporting.

Yes, I think that was also something mentioned in the article I remember reading, although it might have also involved other techniques like maybe using the Median Brush Tool or some such to selectively treat some pixel areas to reduce sharp pixel-to-pixel color transitions more than a 'global' blur could achieve without sacrificing too much detail in areas where that is important.

[RichardMH]

I export from Photo for competitions and I think its the same for designer. My club wants around 2Mb. Usually I drop the size to 3000px on the longest side  (Sometimes they only want 1920x1080 pixels as that's what their monitors have, but some judges have a bit bigger) then play with the quality slider to get the size I want. Rejig it if it doesn't look good. But I sort of work with the size of the monitors I think the  judges will be using. 

[Greggry P]

Thank you so much for all your help everyone. In the end, I managed to achieve exactly what I needed, so all your help was hugely appreciated.