Outsourced files

[Key Ingredient Photography]

Hi Damien and team. 

I recently did a product shoot for a friend and the RAW files were converted from cr3 into a digital negative after importing into Lightroom. The job was initially to shoot against a white background and hand the files over to their graphic designer. 

The friend rings me 3 days later and says the files need to be deep etched. I’m not very good with the pen tool so I outsourced them to DeepEtch and when the digital negative files came back they were 2.3 mb jpgs in a zip file. But when I opened them in photoshop to look them over, the file size in the bottom left hand corner read 20+mp. And the files were 5000+mp on long edge and 3000+mp  on short edge, and 300dpi with 100% quality. 

Something doesn’t feel right here, and these images need to be printed  for catalogue and banner and ecommerce site. Even when I pulled one of my own digital negatives into photoshop and did an Export As- the file sizes were only 2.9 mb at the most. Am I missing some basic education here? First foray into doing something bigger than photographing plates of food for bloggers. 

[Damien Symonds]

Your mistake was to send DNG files.  Of course DNG files can't be deep-etched, so that's why they had to save them as jpegs.  They did the right thing.

[Key Ingredient Photography]

What sort of file format should I send someone who is having to do etching? I thought a dng would at least give them as much info as I could to work with. They did send the files back orginally as a layered .psd file, but the client asked for jpegs. I can’t see how a cut out image on a pure white background, now flattened to a jpg, can be used to make a catalogue etc without having to be etched again. What a headache! 

As always, thank you for your time in replying. Much appreciated. Have donated to beer fund. Thank you Damien. 

[Damien Symonds]

If all you are outsourcing is the deep etching (and it sounds like that's the case here) then you would do all your editing on the images first.  You would save your master PSD files as usual.

Then you would save those files as maximum quality jpegs, and send them off.  They would send them back, also in jpeg format, but with the clipping paths included.

6 minutes ago, Key Ingredient Photography said:

I can’t see how a cut out image on a pure white background

Is that what they did?  Made the background pure white?  That definitely wasn't necessary, they shouldn't have done that.

Are the clipping paths saved in the files?  If you open a file, then go to your Paths panel, is there anything there?  If not, they cocked up.