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I've posted before about file sizes and am still curious. I've recently used Affinity Photo to put together an 11.5 x 9" mailer for a client and was astonished that it was nearly 400mb. By comparison the same design in Pages is about 23mb. Attached screenshots show just the front side. On the Affinity document there is a second layer for the backside, on the Pages document it is a second page but in both cases the backside is fairly similar to the front side consisting of several images and various boxes and text.

 

As much as I love using both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer I'm afraid I'll start shying away from using them if they are consistently producing files of that size. When I've got a bit of time I might try assembling the same flyer in Photoshop and InDesign to get an idea of file sizes in those apps. 

 

See attachments. 

 

Thanks in advance for any insight.

 

Denny

 

 

post-15696-0-72401100-1460044291_thumb.png

post-15696-0-56016300-1460044315_thumb.png

Web & Graphic Design @ beardyguycreative.com

 

Kit: iPad Pro 12.9" and 2012 MacMini

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Hey Darren,

 

Using layers but not live filter layers. Only effect used is drop shadow on a few things.

 

Export to high resolution pdf results in very acceptable (and expected) 7 & 9mb files. 

 

Thanks!

 

Denny

Web & Graphic Design @ beardyguycreative.com

 

Kit: iPad Pro 12.9" and 2012 MacMini

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The large file sizes happen because our file format is optimised for loading speed rather than size. The original images were probably JPEG, but in we store them as ZIP which does not really compress photographs at all. To add insult to injury, we typically store the JPEG as well, and then store multiple copies of the image at successively smaller resolutions.

 

There was a plan to have a "minimise space" option on the Save dialog, but it's not happened yet. I think we will have to do something before Publisher, because Publisher documents could be hundreds of pages and have a lot of images.

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  • Staff

I think we need to see your original file, and your afphoto file.  There will be reasons that your file is large - saved history, resampled image data, etc.  But, we can't say just by being shown a screen grab.

 

Can you provide a drop box link.

Thanks.

SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer
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Your file has loads of embedded images.  These are all at a higher DPI than the document.  Affinity stores all images at their original resolution to allow for resizing without loss to quality.  We also create scaled versions for fast loading.  These are stored with lossless ZIP compression, so will be larger than original JPEG source data.

 

I went through your document and rasterised every Image layer - this will resample the image to the document DPI, creating a Pixel layer instead.  Saved to a new file - the result is about 49MB.  As Dave pointed out - we store raster data in a special way to facilitate fast saving and loading.  It does mean that files are larger.  This is something we will address for the Publisher app.

 

Another thing to note is that we currently do not do linked embedded documents.  The entire source image will be stored in your Affinity file.  If you place the same image a number of times, there will be some overhead.  We try to remove duplicate raster data for pixel layers.  The source file will, however, be embedded multiple times.  You may see an improvement if you place an image once, then use copy-paste to duplicate it, instead of placing an image multiple times.

SerifLabs team - Affinity Developer
  • Software engineer  -  Photographer  -  Guitarist  -  Philosopher
  • iMac 27" Retina 5K (Late 2015), 4.0GHz i7, AMD Radeon R9 M395
  • MacBook (Early 2015), 1.3GHz Core M, Intel HD 5300
  • iPad Pro 10.5", 256GB
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  • 4 weeks later...

Your file has loads of embedded images.  These are all at a higher DPI than the document.  Affinity stores all images at their original resolution to allow for resizing without loss to quality.  We also create scaled versions for fast loading.  These are stored with lossless ZIP compression, so will be larger than original JPEG source data.

 

I went through your document and rasterised every Image layer - this will resample the image to the document DPI, creating a Pixel layer instead.  Saved to a new file - the result is about 49MB.  As Dave pointed out - we store raster data in a special way to facilitate fast saving and loading.  It does mean that files are larger.  This is something we will address for the Publisher app.

 

Another thing to note is that we currently do not do linked embedded documents.  The entire source image will be stored in your Affinity file.  If you place the same image a number of times, there will be some overhead.  We try to remove duplicate raster data for pixel layers.  The source file will, however, be embedded multiple times.  You may see an improvement if you place an image once, then use copy-paste to duplicate it, instead of placing an image multiple times.

Hello

 

I have the same problem but I do not comprehend your reply completely.

 

I understand why afphoto file size is huge(362mb, my case). I wonder if you have better around.

What I did when I use noise reduction (luminance extreme) to remove noise on my 42mb image, taken at ISO6400. I developed the raw and 362mb afphoto was created. Then I export this 362mb afphoto to jpeg for further edit and delete 362mb afphoto. I did this so that I do not save all the huge afphoto files.

 

Am I doing it correctly or is there a better way.

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Ekoh,

 

JPEG is a lossy format incapable of storing layers, vector shapes, & other features of the native Affinity file format. To preserve the highest possible image quality & to enable future edits, I recommend that you do not delete the afphoto files unless you are certain you will not mind the quality loss.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 3 years later...
On 4/8/2016 at 10:44 AM, Ben said:

Your file has loads of embedded images.  These are all at a higher DPI than the document.  Affinity stores all images at their original resolution to allow for resizing without loss to quality.  We also create scaled versions for fast loading.  These are stored with lossless ZIP compression, so will be larger than original JPEG source data.

 

I went through your document and rasterised every Image layer - this will resample the image to the document DPI, creating a Pixel layer instead.  Saved to a new file - the result is about 49MB.  As Dave pointed out - we store raster data in a special way to facilitate fast saving and loading.  It does mean that files are larger.  This is something we will address for the Publisher app.

 

Another thing to note is that we currently do not do linked embedded documents.  The entire source image will be stored in your Affinity file.  If you place the same image a number of times, there will be some overhead.  We try to remove duplicate raster data for pixel layers.  The source file will, however, be embedded multiple times.  You may see an improvement if you place an image once, then use copy-paste to duplicate it, instead of placing an image multiple times.

Hi Ben, is there any updates on this? I have some huge files  going on here too and it would be nice to have small ones, as I only work with linked images. 

Thanks!

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4 hours ago, Felipe FM said:

Hi Ben, is there any updates on this? I have some huge files  going on here too and it would be nice to have small ones, as I only work with linked images. 

Linked images (JPG, TIFF, PNG) work just fine. Documents (PDF, .afpub, .afdesign, .afphoto, SVG, EPS, ...) are always embedded currently, though they can be linked to the extent that you'll be notified of changes to the original.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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1 hour ago, Felipe FM said:

Got it. Is "link document" (particularly .afdesign and .afphoto) somewhere in the roadmap?

Only Serif would know, and typically they won't say, but sometimes they do. We'll have to wait to see if one of the moderators gives any hint :)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 years later...

Hi and welcome to the forums @100michelle100,

A few questions. I am going to assume you are exporting a file after resizing an Affinity document. What sort of Document? Is it from Designer, Photo or Publisher? Also are you running Mac or Windows OS? What file format are you exporting to? PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF? What is the bit depth of the exported file 8 or 16? What is the colour format of the export RGB orCMYK?

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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