I’d like some advice if anyone can help. I find that when I create my photomanipulations in Photoshop CS3, the image always looks clear & sharp (if that is the effect I am going for) in Photoshop but then when I save it, I feel like I lose some of the quality. Then again, when I upload them to RB, I feel like I can see the loss of quality. Is there something special or some particular way I should be saving my files? Something I can do before saving my images?

Any help appreciated :) Thanks :)

Well, first of all, it depends on what format do you use to save the image. For the web images there are 3 standard format that are JPG, GIF and PNG, that have different type of image compression that cause a loss of quality.

PNG (24 bit) has the best compression, that means you don’t see any loss, but the image size is high. With the PNG you can also keep the trasparency or a gradient trasparency (called “alpha channel”)

GIF compression is on colors, you see the image clear and sharp, but with a less number of colors (if there are more than 256). GIF can also keep a flat trasparency (that means that you can have a full opacity or a full trasparency, but nothing between them)

JPG uses a function compression that keeps the colors, but there’s a loss of clearness.

All of this format can be adjust, ex. you can choose the number of colors for the GIF or the quality of compression for the JPG.
You can experiment all this format image type by using the Photoshop function “Save for web” (under “File” tab) or simply save your work with “save as”.

As I could see, RB create a preview image of works (and so use a personal compression) to avoid that the images shown are to big sized (that cause a long time wait to be seen). For example the images used for the tee, often are 1MB or more, and they were too heavy to be shown on a browser, but I am sure that RB will use the original images when they have to make a stamp.

Hope to be helpful :)

Wow thank you japu this infor is great.

personally, i save all my work as tif files until im finished working on them. this way, no resolution is lost. i only save as a jpeg or whatever once the picture is really really finished.

For intermediate images (things you want to edit again later) and for storage, Rose is absolutely right: TIF or whatever your app uses as a native format is the way to go. Sure, the files get big, but storage is cheap.

Never, ever use JPG as an intermediate format. It loses clarity every time.

For web display, first read Japu’s post because it is great, then:

1. PNG is good if you don’t mind the size. It is really designed for the web.
2. JPG is the one to use for photographic-type images. JPG has problems with some pictures involving high-contrast things on very even backgrounds. For example, if you have black text on a white background and save it as JPG you have to set the quality (and thus file size) very high or it looks muddy. Back in the day of slow connections, I used to spend a lot of time saving JPG images at lower and lower quality until I got the smallest file size that still looked good, because some images look just fine at real low quality and some look crappy unless the quality is set very high. I also used an extremely low quality setting for artistic effect sometimes.
3. GIF is great for cartooney graphics and logos and such. 256 color limit makes it a poor choice for photographic images and those with delicate shading. It uses run-length compression, which means that internaly it says (sort of) “color, how many pixels that color”. If there are lots of pixels of the same color together, the compression works great. If there are lots of changes from one pixel to the next (like in a photo) the GIF can actually be bigger than the original.