TIFF size is 32mb for a 300dpi image, is this abnormally large?!?

Question

I created a poster in InDesign, exported it as an EPS, opened it up in Illustrator and from there exported it as a TIFF. it is 300 dpi, and when saved, the dimension is 2550x3309 and the size is 32.2mb!! for an 8.5x11" printout! is it supposed to be this large!? or how may i scale it down without losing quality??

thanks!

Answer 1

If it's 32bpp (bits per pixel) uncompressed, then that's right. TIFF supports the compression formats packbits, deflate, LZW, and JPEG for color images. JPEG is a lossy compression, meaning it will degrade the image to an extent depending on the quality factor. The other compression methods are lossless, but have lower compression ratios. Your image appears to be in CMYK format (print ready). CMYK takes up more disk space (32bpp) than RGB (24bpp), but there may be fewer or no compression options for CMYK.



To calculate the rough file size of an uncompressed image the formula is length x width x bpp/8:

2550 x 3309 x 32/8 = 33,751,800 = 32.2 MiB

Answer 2

How can you scale down without losing quality?



By definition, you cannot.



You need to play with it, scaling down to see if the lower quality is acceptable.



Do you require tiff? If not, convert to png or jpg and fiddle with that.



For most purposes, a very low quality is not detectable. Major cropping and large printed formats are the obvious exceptions.



GIMP, Photoshop and many other viewer/processor programs allow scaling.

Answer 3

Yep, sounds about right. You might be able to shrink the file size a bit by converting to JPEG.

Answer 4

TIFFs are always huge, try a PNG.