: Picture loses quality upon saving in Photoshop CS5 I am using adobe Photoshop CS5, I am transforming my picture into black and white via "Calculations" and then i apply "Shadows and Highlights"

@Alves566

What I found is that the Windows Photo app decreases the quality of the pic while viewing, whereas if you view the same .jpeg pic in the Windows Photo Viewer, it looks much crispier.
Infact, if you try to use the editing tool from the Photos app, you will see that while editing it retains the quality of the pic.
I am never using Photos app again for viewing my pics.
Hope this helps.

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@Rivera951

In case someone still encounters this issue; try saving your JPG on a quality up to 7. 7 and above don't use 'chroma subsampling'. basicly anything above 6 balloons the size of the file, but decreases the quality.

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@Alves566

As others have noted the JPG format is lossy it will lose information with each save, thus each progressive save makes the image a bit worse.

PNG can also be lossy, and it is also "lossless".


PNG-8 is an indexed lossy format, rather like GIF.
PNG-24 is a lossless but compressed format, which will make very nice images but the file size is much bigger.




Recommendation / How I work


I typically start with a JPG off my camera.
Open the image in Photoshop
File > Save As > desired file name.psd (PSD's are awesome! They retain full quality and all layering/adjustment info. They're the best for a "working" file. You can make all the changes you could desire and you won't lose any quality. Yes, this will be a very large file, but it's worth it.)
Continue working/adjusting
Save the PSD often
When satisfied with your changes, do File > Save For Web > JPG > select your preferred level of compression > Save button (I recommend JPG for most photo style images since it balances the quality to file size ratio better than PNG. PNG works best with illustraions, it can do photos but that's not it's primary strength, in my mind.)
Upload JPG to image sharing site of choice. (JPG is the final result because it keeps none of the layering data and is nice and small for web bandwidth concerns.)

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@Hamaas979

If you want to have best quality of image save it as .PNG format and also select speed uncompressed but the output file size will be large with very good quality. Or you can also increase the resoultion while creating the document or using canvas image option.

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@Martha945

I avoid JPG for that express reason. If you're able to, save as a PNG instead.

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