What's the best jpg size from RAW, without losing too much?

[Buffalo]

Finally got around to trying out aperture to sort and do a few fiddles to photos taken with my Nikon D80. I'm starting now to think about exporting a load of photos for "photobucket" uploads/DVD albums for people, etc and wondered how "big" a .jpg ought to be when you are converting from RAW (which is what i predominately shoot in now)?

I assume if you make it too small then too much detail is lost? So are there any rough sort of guidelines at all..?

Cheers guys! ~PHIL

[flat-planedCrank]

Buffalo said:

Finally got around to trying out aperture to sort and do a few fiddles to photos taken with my Nikon D80. I'm starting now to think about exporting a load of photos for "photobucket" uploads/DVD albums for people, etc and wondered how "big" a .jpg ought to be when you are converting from RAW (which is what i predominately shoot in now)?

I assume if you make it too small then too much detail is lost? So are there any rough sort of guidelines at all..?

Cheers guys! ~PHIL

Hi

I'm guessing you mean 'big' as-in filesize rather than resolution..
I'd just take a quick look at other peoples images, check their rough filesizes and go along with that
The problem with absolute filesize guidelines is that some images compress much easier than others, mainly based on the 'complexity' of the image. (E.g. A picture of a stadium crowd would not compress as well as a photo of a blue door)

If you compress an image too heavily then you will get 'compression artefacts' or errors creeping into the image, seen here :
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d...

If you are using something like photoshop then there is an option to 'save for web' where you can easily compare your original image with the final compressed result.

Cheers