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The thing about file sizes for digital art totally caught me off guard
I was getting some pieces ready for a gallery submission last month and needed to check the file specs. Turns out a 300 DPI TIFF from my usual canvas size is around 250 MB. I always assumed JPEG was fine for print but the gallery specifically wanted TIFFs. Found this out from a print shop's submission guidelines page that I almost skipped over. How do you all handle file storage for high-res work without buying a new hard drive every six months?
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benb211mo ago
That 180MB TIFF hit made me ditch my old JPEG-only mindset real quick.
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300 DPI TIFFs are no joke, right? I had basically the same shock last year when I was prepping stuff for a group show at this small gallery in Portland. My go-to canvas is 24x36 inches at 300 DPI and a flattened TIFF clocks in at around 180 MB easy, layered PSDs are triple that. I started hitting the wall with my external drives pretty fast. Now I just keep all my working files on a big 4TB portable SSD and archive old finished pieces to a couple of cheap 8TB desktop drives I got on sale. It's not a perfect system but it beats buying new drives every few months.
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