Exporting without wrecking it at the last step

Losing it at the last step

Three hours of work, and the file you send has banded skies, soft edges and a colour cast. All three are export faults, all three are avoidable, and all three are common.

Formats, and what each is for

JPEG: photographic content, no transparency. Quality 85 to 92 for delivery; below 80 shows artefacts in gradients and at edges. Progressive encoding for web, because it renders in passes as it loads.

PNG: transparency, flat colour, anything with type or sharp edges. Lossless, therefore large. A PNG of a photograph is often 5 to 10× the equivalent JPEG for no visible gain.

WebP: the sensible web default. Smaller than JPEG at the same quality, supports transparency, supported everywhere that matters now. Quality 80 to 85.

TIFF: print delivery and archiving. Lossless, 16-bit capable, carries CMYK and profiles. The format to hand a printer.

PDF: anything typeset. Vector type stays vector, so it is sharp at any size. For press, ask which PDF/X standard they want.

The commonest mistake is delivering a JPEG for print. Ask for TIFF or PDF, because the compression artefacts invisible on a screen are visible on paper, particularly in skies and skin.

The settings that matter

Colour profile: embed it. A file without an embedded profile is interpreted by whatever opens it, and the usual symptom is an image that looks washed out or oversaturated on someone else’s machine. Export sRGB with the profile embedded for screen, and the printer’s CMYK profile embedded for print. This single setting causes more “it looks different on my computer” than anything else.

Bit depth. 8-bit for delivery. 16-bit for anything that will be edited further: the extra depth is what prevents banding when a gradient is adjusted again.

Resampling method. If the export resizes, the method matters. Lanczos for downscaling; bicubic is acceptable. Nearest neighbour is for pixel art only, and using it by accident produces a harsh, aliased result.

Metadata. Decide deliberately. Camera and software metadata is usually harmless; generation prompts, which some interfaces embed, may not be something you want to ship to a client or publish. Strip it for delivery, keep it on your archived original.

Banding, and how to prevent it

Banding (visible steps in a gradient, most often in skies) comes from too few distinct values to describe a smooth transition, made worse by compression.

Three preventions:

1. Work in 16-bit when the image has large smooth gradients.
2. Add a small amount of noise before export. Two or three per cent of monochrome noise breaks the bands up and is invisible. This is why the grain step in the composite lesson helps here too.
3. Export at higher JPEG quality, or use PNG or WebP for images dominated by gradients.

Check the exported file

Not the working document. Open the actual delivered file and look at it, because export is a transformation and transformations have faults.

Specifically: skies and gradients at 100%, edges of composited elements, the darkest and lightest areas for clipping, and the overall colour against the working file.

Thirty seconds, and it catches the export that silently converted to a different profile.

Sizes to deliver

Give the client what they need and nothing confusing:

deliver/
  spring26-07-print-A3-300dpi.tif       CMYK, printer's profile
  spring26-07-web-2560.webp             sRGB
  spring26-07-social-1080x1350.jpg      sRGB
  spring26-07-thumb-600.jpg             sRGB
  spring26-07-layered.xcf               editable, type live
  README.txt                            what each file is, and the disclosure note

The README is the part people skip and the part clients appreciate most. Four lines saying which file is for what prevents the print file being uploaded to Instagram and the social crop being sent to the printer, both of which happen regularly.

The limitation

None of this recovers quality that was lost earlier. An image upscaled badly, over-sharpened or graded into clipped blacks cannot be exported well; export preserves what it is given.

And a note on platform compression: social platforms re-encode whatever you upload, often aggressively, and your carefully exported file is not what viewers see. You can improve the outcome slightly by uploading at exactly the platform’s stated dimensions so it does not resample, and by avoiding fine high-contrast detail that compression handles badly. You cannot prevent it, and an image that depends on subtle gradient detail will be damaged by a system you have no access to.