Why are my Jpg files so small after being saved from Nef

Question

Hi,
I am finally posting after months of trying to figure out why my images are saving so small, some 4mb after converting from Nef to Jpg.
I am shooting with a Nikon D4s and came from a D800. I was spoilt with really large file sizes and now I am freaking out because my jpegs are so small.
I am checking all the right boxes as far as I can see to save the jpg as large as I can, and I am not cropping the images before saving as Jpg.
Has anyone else had this problem? I can't understand why a camera as amazing as the D4s is giving me such small files. I have read everywhere that my files need to be over 6mb to be classed as high res.
The only thing that I can think of is maybe I am pushing my nefs too hard in camera raw/lightroom resulting in a loss of quality? Although my exposure is correct 90% of the time so Im only playing with highlights or luminance.
Can anyone walk me through the process of what I should be doing so I can end this headache!
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

ashleyp1563 wrote:
Images are 16pm (4928x3280px as you say), and the doc is 48mb.
So here's where I really show myself up... am I right in assuming that the more adobe compresses an image the lower the mb is on the final file, meaning if there is less detail (i.e. the low-key image is predominately black) then the jpeg will be smaller. Does this affect the print quality?
4mb seems very low res to me. How can I retain as much of the information as possible? Do you think I should sharpen more to retain detail? Or does it even matter and I'm fretting over nothing!
Okay. The file dimensions are fine, so we're talking purely about content and compression.
As I already said, the low-key image contains very little data in the first place (lots of black and no colour), so it compresses well.  The dreamy woman image contains a lot of plain blue sky and out-of-focus background, so that compresses well too. No surprises there.
Have you got any more detailed images with greater depth of field? Try creating a JPEG of that and see how big the file is.
An Adobe JPEG Quality setting of 12 means minimum compression and therefore maximum file size. But, even so, if you saved an image which was just a single plain colour, you would find that the resulting JPEG would be just a few kB. This is how compression works.
The lower the quality number is set, the higher the compression, the more detail is lost, and the more JPEG artefacts are created in the image.  You are already saving at 12 quality, which is the highest setting, so you are minimising any problems with detail. You should save as TIFF if you want absolutely no loss of detail, but the file sizes are much bigger.
4MB is not a resolution. Think of it as packing a suitcase. If you're taking lots of books, you won't get the lid down. If you're taking lots of soft woollen sweaters, you can take lots. 4MB is an indication of the space that your packed image takes—if it's made of light fluffy stuff then it will be a smaller suitcase! :-)
You should sharpen your images the same as any other. Large areas of plain or out-of-focus background need not be sharpened. You're okay. Stop worrying!