: Why is image size becoming larger after cropping it in PS? I am using photoshop to crop Youtube preview images like this one, which is a .jpg file, the url being "http://img.youtube.com/vi/g-LvhmaHEWA/0.jpg"

@Hamaas979

The "original size" you are seeing isn't a JPEG, it'll be either a PSD or a TIFF. Photoshop isn't looking at the original file, it's looking at the image that's currently open in the application, and that's an uncompressed image.

The reason why you're seeing a larger file size when you try to save a new JPEG version is that the JPEG you're working with is badly compressed with a lot of artifacts. Photoshop (or, rather, the JPEG compression algorithm) sees those artifacts as image data and will try to preserve them. Basically, the crappy picture seems to be more complicated than the "original original" clearer picture was, so as counterintuitive as it may seem, you'd wind up with a smaller file in the end if you started out with a much larger one.

There is a Photoshop tool (and there are better plugins) that can "de-JPEG" the image to a degree, but the image is small and the artifacting here is pretty severe, so it's highly doubtful that you'd see much improvement - cleaning up the artifacts automatically would probably destroy the image. If you put some work into it, you can probably kill some of the "ringing" and blockiness manually, but you really have to watch that you don't turn it into a painting as you're doing so. The smaller an image is, the harder it is to keep it looking like a photograph.

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