Back to Dye Printing Tricks & Tips
Every now and then I get a massive file with very few elements in it. Upon investigation I find out that the few photos used are actually all the same photo, just cropped and copied and recropped. That makes for large ungainly files. The computer has to keep track of all this data that is not being used. Worse yet, I've gotten 11"x9" scans of 2"x2" photos with LOTS of extra white margin all the way around. Again, what should be a few hundred kilobytes is turned into a few dozen megabytes.
And the longer it takes to open, preflight, RIP and image your file, the more you'll get charged.
So here's an example of a large megaphoto.
Notice it's 17.5 megs. Look at the checkerboard pattern (the kitchen floor tile that Photoshop uses to show "nuthin is there")--that's memory the computer has to deal with, but is actually nothing and in this case cropped out in the PageMaker document.
Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (the dotted line box in the top left of your Tool Box) to select an area much closer to your needs. Then go to >Image>Crop to cut away all the unnecessary stuff.
Look at that! Now you're already down to 14.8 megs.
I then make a copy of this file and individually crop and save each photograph and name it more specifically. This particular example yields a photo that is 474k. All twelve photos (the charts strangely enough weren't necessary) still only came to 6 megs total. A fraction of the original document. Easier to work with, faster to run.
