Converting RAW to JPEG

[Chonga]

Hi All,
I'm getting myself in a right pickle.
Today I took some shots in RAW format as opposed to large JPEG.
I've uploaded the images to my PC and each image is around the 5.2mb size. I've opened one of the images in PSE5 and cropped to suit. I then attempted to save this image as a JPEG so I could upload onto My Gallery.
The save options open to me were PSD, JPEG200, PDF, RAW, PNG, PSE, TIFF.
If I saved to any of the above file extensions then the size of the image balloons to around 20mb plus. (PC doesn't recognise the JPEG2000 format)
If I then resize the image to the size required to upload to 'My Gallery' the image quality is un-usable.

How can I save my RAW image to a workable JPEG that I can use to upload a good quality image to 'My Gallery'?

 

[Cobra]

Not quite sure how it works in E5 but you will need to make sure that its converted to 8bits to get the "normal" Jpeg options

 

[Snake Man]

First three things to check are:

1: Are you trying to save multiple layers? Make sure you flatten the image.
2: Are you in 8 bit mode?
3: Are you in RGB mode?

 

[Sheep]

I have a JPEG option available to me in Elements 5 that shrinks the size of the file from the original RAW size, in my case the RAW was around 11mb and the JPEG after work on it around the 4MB. I then just save these to web to get them onto here.

I opened mine in Camera Raw then tweaked them and saved as 8 bit JPEGs,although somewhere along the line a PSD version is saved


In Elements 5 the 8bit window appears in Camera Raw at the bottom left beneath the picture if that helps.

 

[Chonga]

Thanks for the replies. It was in 16bit so I'm down to 8bit now it is giving me the normal Jpeg extension to save to.

Cheers