ornithopod
Member
I have been a user of PhotoImpact from Ulead for several years, progressing from v4 to XL. However, for various reasons I have decided to switch to Photoshop Elements v3 from Adobe. I am therefore experiencing the normal conversion problems when things that I can do easily with PhotoImpact, because I'm familiar with that product, appear difficult with Photoshop!
Most such problems are easily fixable, but one problem I have found impossible to get around. It appears to me that Photoshop cannot write JPG files with a similar quality/size trade off as that achieved by other software.
I run i-Catcher software to collect images from a couple of bird boxes in the garden. This produces images of 384x288 pixels from video cameras either inside or just outside the nestboxes. I use 24-bit colour and so the uncompressed size of these images is about 324KB. These images are converted to JPG files of about 26KB by selecting quality of 75% in the i-Catcher software.
If I load one of these image files into PhotoImpact, and copy it with no modification by immediately using Save As, with JPG quality set at 80, then PhotoImpact also writes a file of about 26KB of a quality that is indistinguishable from the i-Catcher image, even at high magnification.
However, if I do the same thing with Photoshop and I choose Medium quality (6), I end up with an image of similar quality but much larger, about 50KB for the above example. If I want to get a file of similar size, I have to specify ultra low quality (0) and this looks much worse.
The size of these images is important as the good ones end up on our web site at www.biggonline.co.uk
So that you can see what I am talking about, I have attached three images. The first, Bluey.jpg - 26KB, is the original image produced by i-Catcher. The second, Bluey-PI.jpg - 26KB, is the image created by opening the first using PhotoImpact XL, and creating a new image using Save As, with a quality setting of 80. The third, Bluey-0.jpg - 32KB, is the image created by doing the same with Photoshop Elements v3, using a quality setting of 0 (zero).
Not only is this a much poorer image, which you can clearly see if you zoom in to 400% or so, but it is also more than 15% larger!
I find it difficult to believe that it is Adobe that has got it wrong, I realise it's probably me! What am I missing?
Most such problems are easily fixable, but one problem I have found impossible to get around. It appears to me that Photoshop cannot write JPG files with a similar quality/size trade off as that achieved by other software.
I run i-Catcher software to collect images from a couple of bird boxes in the garden. This produces images of 384x288 pixels from video cameras either inside or just outside the nestboxes. I use 24-bit colour and so the uncompressed size of these images is about 324KB. These images are converted to JPG files of about 26KB by selecting quality of 75% in the i-Catcher software.
If I load one of these image files into PhotoImpact, and copy it with no modification by immediately using Save As, with JPG quality set at 80, then PhotoImpact also writes a file of about 26KB of a quality that is indistinguishable from the i-Catcher image, even at high magnification.
However, if I do the same thing with Photoshop and I choose Medium quality (6), I end up with an image of similar quality but much larger, about 50KB for the above example. If I want to get a file of similar size, I have to specify ultra low quality (0) and this looks much worse.
The size of these images is important as the good ones end up on our web site at www.biggonline.co.uk
So that you can see what I am talking about, I have attached three images. The first, Bluey.jpg - 26KB, is the original image produced by i-Catcher. The second, Bluey-PI.jpg - 26KB, is the image created by opening the first using PhotoImpact XL, and creating a new image using Save As, with a quality setting of 80. The third, Bluey-0.jpg - 32KB, is the image created by doing the same with Photoshop Elements v3, using a quality setting of 0 (zero).
Not only is this a much poorer image, which you can clearly see if you zoom in to 400% or so, but it is also more than 15% larger!
I find it difficult to believe that it is Adobe that has got it wrong, I realise it's probably me! What am I missing?
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