Digital Wedding Photography For Dummies

Saving Your Images to Your Hard Drive

After you have tweaked, molded, and polished your images to perfection, the last step in the process is to save them to your hard drive. But before you do, you need to make a few decisions first. These decisions should be based on what you plan on doing with those photos after you save them. For example, are you sending them off to a printer, or are you uploading them to your blog? In this section I go over the various elements to consider before saving your finalized photographs as well as how to actually export those photos from Lightroom to your hard drive.

Considering a few final changes

The way you save an image changes slightly based on how you’ll use the photo. In the following sections, I talk about resolution, image size, file format, and watermarking — all of which are affected by whether your photos will be viewed on a computer or printed.

Choosing a file format

Before I dive into the two types of file formats you should use to save your images, you need to know why choosing a file type even matters in the first place. File types have to do with image compression, which can be broken down into two categories: lossless compression and lossy compression.

Lossless compression refers to an image saved with all its original information, with no data lost. This type of saving results in a rather large file size to accommodate all that ...