Best image quality

Ziggy

Ziggy

Messages
969
Name
Mike
Edit My Images
Yes
Hope somebody can help.

I have been shooting in RAW recently as I like the features it gives me for editing the pictures after I have taken them.

The question I have is around what format I should save them in once I have made the adjustments that I want and opened the image in photoshop.

The default seems to be jpg, but I notice that the file sizes are small. Am I losing quality by doing this?

I was looking at opening a smgmug account and want to know what I have to do to ensure that the images I upload are the best quality so that my pictures look at good as they can.

Sorry for being stupid but is something which I simply do not understand.

Thanks in advance.
 
You will lose some quality each time you save as jpeg as each save loses some finer details to get a smaller file size. You would need to use a lossless format, such as tiff (or keep the *.psd file), for any intermediary edits.
You will be fine saving the final copy as a high quality jepg.
 
Your final output file will always be a JPEG.

The files are small because the data has been mathematically compressed, to make the size manageable, but that doesn't mean any detail has been lost. Example: say you have a large expanse of clear sky, a perfectly even blue all over, covering a large part of the frame - say it's 4m pixels in total. In the orignal file, that might be written as 01010101010101010101 and so on and so on four million times (it won't be, but you get the idea). That's a massive string of code, so a JPEG will reduce that to a formula like 01 x 4m, which is obviously massively shorter but comes out the same.

You do lose some data, but not much depending on the compression level and it's only data that you don't need. A high quality JPEG is indistinguishable from the original file, even in a massive print.
 
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Once you have played with the raw save it as photoshops uncompressed format (.psd which is effectively a .tiff) for final editing then save as high quality jpeg when you have finalised it in photoshops normal suite.
 
If you have finished editing with Adobe Camera Raw and decide to save at best Jpeg quality, if you set the pull down menu and set it to Maximum, it gives a Quality value of 10. You can however you can type in a value in the Quality box up to 12. Why Maximum doesn't give you 12 I don't know. :shrug:

I just saved two images, one at Quality 10 (Maximum) and one with 12 typed into the Quality box. and it gave me file sizes of 2.66MB and 6.38MB. That's quite a difference in file sizes, but I assume the bigger file gives the best quality.
 
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