Flattening an image

In raw how can one flatten an image upon creating several adjustment layers?  Simple question from someone totally new.

timetravelerxiv wrote:
...upon completion I'm ending with very large file sizes, and curious how to control that.
It's not entirely clear what you mean.  Large file sizes for your RAW files, or large file sizes for images that you export?
I would guess that you mean large file sizes on exported images, since the size of the RAW file being used by Lightroom remains virtually unchanged regardless of the number of edits that are made in Lightroom.  Metadata might change the file size a tiny bit, but this wil be have a negligible effect.
So, if we are talking about exported images being too large, what format are you exporting them in?  JPG, TIF, PSD?
One topic that has been covered quite a few times on the Internet for the last few versions of LR is the large file size of JPEG files exported from Lightroom.  If you export your edited photos as JPEGs at 100% quality, then you will certainly get huge JPG files; sometimes as big as 2 megabytes per megapixel, depending largely upon the complexity of the image data in that particular photograph.  The solution in that case (assuming hard drive space is limited or you need to send the file over the internet) is to simply turn down the quality to somewhere in the range of 80%-90%.  You'll see a significant drop in file size.  You can decrease the file size even further, of course, by exporting JPEGs only as large as you actually need them to be.  So, for example, if you're exporting an image that you plan to email someone just to give them a look at your work, you could export it at only 800px and 85% quality and your resulting file will be very compact.

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