Scanned pictures opened in Photoshop CS5 and saved becomes lo-res ???

I have a scanned jpg file.

Why is it that if i open the jpg in Photoshop CS5 and save the file.

The picture quality visually drops ?

As in the picture will lose some of its sharpness and become lo-res ?

Is there any way around this ?

 

Quality and Resolution are entirley different things (except when discussing on the ability to resolved details from a source etc etc.)

If your loosing resolution then your going from say 1600x1200 image to 1066x800 or something. If its doing this then im not sure whats causing it but i have a feeling this is a jpeg compression quality setting issue.

JPEG images can be more or less compressed, in the save dialog (never used CS5 only CS2 and 3). There is a slider for quality, if not there should be an options button. You may also not be on the adobe dialog and have switched to the windows dialog option.

Eitherway if your resaving a single edit to a jpeg find the quality option and change it. If your doing repeat work, each save will lose quality over the last. Use a lossless format like PNG or TIFF to store master edits. JPEG for finals or distribution copies.

 

can I use photoshop to convert to Tiff or should I use a 3rd party software to do this ...

will converting to Tiff in photoshop lowers the picture quality ?

 

I use PNG's for my "In Edit" saves but eitherway Photoshop has built in support for TIFF and many other formats.

TIFF's have the option of using no compression, lzw (i think thats what it is) and jpeg among other compression. If you save with the options of not compressed or the default lzw there is no quality loss. If you save it with jpeg compression obviously you should just use a jpeg.

As well as PNG, PNG is a lossless format and web browsers support it. It also has support for alpha transparency, which probably isnt useful as far as scanning and editing but more for graphic design and logos. Anyways its lossless under any normal use.

Anyways have you looked into what settings ur saving it with? The loss between edit saves when starting with a quality source and ending with high quality settings usually isnt enough to notice right away. But if your repeatedly editing the file its not a great way to save.

This is what the jpeg options dialog looks like when saving - http://forums.adobe.com/servlet/Jiv.../2-2910011-31523/335-286/SaveAsJpegDialog.jpg

Unless maybe your not using Save/SaveAs and are using something else like export.

 

ok - Thank you very much for all the great info

I learnt something today