Avoid JPEG Level 7?

[davegee]

For those to whom JPEG quality is an issue, some recent articles and trials suggest that Adobe's Level 7, when saving as a JPEG, is best avoided:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/1108/11082915jpegupdate.asp

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality#surprise

Levels 0-6 and 8-12 are linear in quality/file size terms but level 7 is not always of better quality than level 6.

The articles point out that the results only apply to LR and PS "Save As".

"Save for the Web" does not, apparently, work the same way.

DG

[fh1805]

My version of Lightroom doesn't use these absolute values for the JPEG quality. It uses a slider to control "Quality" as a percentage value. Because of the way I work in my end-to-end workflow, I always set the Lightroom export value to 100%. The final Save As in Photoshop Elements is always at level 8. I've never felt dissatisfied with the end results.

regards,

Peter

[davegee]

Peter,

Although it (LR) doesn't have "absolute" values the suggestion is that there is no difference between ranges of quality values.

I believe that the example given is that there is no quality difference between for instance 70% and 76%.

The equivalent of "Save as" Quality 7 for you (LR) appears to be between quality 54-61%.

A question for you: Why do you set a quality value when sending from LR to Elements - surely you send as a 16 Bit TIFF to which this does not apply?

Otherwise I agree with you entirely. We have discussed this before and each person's Save As setting is going to be different and depends on factors relating to Camera, resolution etc.....

Which is why (in PS) my preference was for "Save for the Web" for a number of reasons.

Firstly it allows you to SEE the result you can expect from a particular quality setting in real time and secondly it automaticlly converts to sRGB for those occasions when you forget to do it yourself.

DG

[fh1805]

Dave,

The image that goes to Elements needs only to be placed in the layer stack between its preceeding and succeeding images and adjusted to provide the best "third image". It doesn't usually get any other manipulation. All that happens is that the cropped/re-composed image is Saved As the final JPEG (level=8) for the sequence.

regards,

Peter