: Layers Styles in Photoshop making the file size huge I'm using a few layer styles for an image to sort of create metal effects and shine. On this particular example I have 8 effects being

@Alves566

First of all: 20MB is not large. I routinely take photos using a Canon 4Ti DSLR which creates 25MB RAW files that are about 21MB when saved as a 1-layer TIFF with LZW compression (after cropping/fixing).

That said, you asked "why."

So normal bottom layer in a PSD is going to be a minimum of (pixel width x height x channels) bytes. For RGB color, this is 3 channels. A 1920 x 1080 RGB image is approximately 6MB. These are "memory sizes" not file storage sizes.

Each additional layer potentially is going to be the same memory size, but often is some fraction of this since additional layers are rarely fully filled.

Each layer mask is going to be a 1-channel image (one third the size of the above quoted 6MB in our example).

So if you have a 6MB base-layer, then you need to account for 14MB more across 7 additional layers. Not that big of a strecth.

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@Samaraweera207

I have clients working with 100-200...700 mb PSD files. One large brochure with many pictures (PSD, TIF, etc) can easily go into the GB+ range. For large print jobs this is 'normal'. Depends on what you are using these for.

One thing you can do, but this only adds up to the overall size, is create a separate folder with flattened PSD's, which will be considerably lower in size.

Keep the larger layered versions separately in case you need to go back and make edits.

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