Poor Picture Quality After Editing

[heirmeistr]

I must be doing something wrong. Here is my process: I upload my digital pictures from my camera's memory card into the PSE4 organizer. If I make any adjustments it is typically for highlights and shadows through the quick fix (before and after view). I then replace the original jpeg with the corrected jpeg file (save as, replace, quality of 12) because it looks better (at first glance). But when I print the picture, or look at it in a larger view, it looks like there is some slight noise or pixel manipulation going on. The quality of the picture is not as good. The lighting is better but the overall picture is not. Hope that makes sense. What am I doing wrong? What can I do different? Thanks.

[Norm F]

Harry,

I am at a loss to explain what might be happening here. Anytime you re-save a JPEG it does re-compress the file and doing that too many times will degrade your image. However, you shouldn't be seeing a serious loss of quality on the first resave, especially when saving at 12.

Try giving your files a new name when you are ready to save the corrected image, ie: original name-1. See if that makes any difference. It's always a good idea to keep your originals intact until you are absolutely certain you won't need to use it again.

[Wendy]

Hi Harry ...

Sometime when you lighten a dark image you get digital noise ... I just wonder if that it what you are seeing :)

Wendy

[TonyW]

I think Wendy might have the right answer. If you zoom in close as you make the edits you can see that "lighten shadow" creates quite a lot of noise - to be fair on Elements the noise was probably already there but you couldn't see it because it was too dark. You might want to try making your edits while zoomed right in and see if that's the cause. If not then I can't think of any other reason.

Tony

[heirmeistr]

I think both Tony and Wendy are right. I think I am seeing digital noise when I lighten the shadows. I was hoping there was a way to fix the digital noise after lightening the shadows but it doesn't look like it. Thanks for the responses. - Harry

[Wendy]

Harry ...

Have you tried using Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise on them ... its can work quite well :)

Wendy

[TonyW]

And if that doesn't work try Neat Image (http://www.neatimage.com/). The stand-alone demo which is pretty much fully functional is free. Or you can buy the plug-in for Photoshop which works in Elements. I have it and it does an excellent job on noise.

BTW the noise you get in dark areas is due to a fundamental law of physics, light arrives randomly, not all at once. So it's impossible to eliminate and very hard to fix. Best solution I'm afraid is not to have dark areas :)

Tony