To Squish or not to Squish

This is a guest post from Stan White of Scrapper’s Workshop. Stan will be dropping by from time to time to offer expert advice on photography, photo editing and Photoshop.

JPG? JPEG?  If you are involved in anything with pictures, digital imaging, or digital scrapbooking you’ve seen this term.  JPEG  is the format in which we most often save our images. This format was agreed upon by the Joint Photographic Experts Group a long long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away?) for compressing images. By using a single standard compression method and format, the Group ensured that images saved by your camera can be read by your computer, or my computer, or the computer at WalMart in Peoria… you get the idea. The problem with JPEG is… you don’t want to save an image as a .jpg file too many times. “Why?” you ask? Let me show you:

Digital cameras take big pictures – millions of pieces of data.  To save space and time, most cameras will compress the file into a JPG image.  Yes, JPG’s are a compressed format – you squish the millions of bits of data to a smaller size. This can be compared to folding a piece of paper in half. When you open it back up, the fold is there, but doesn’t substantially change the image, it’s still easily readable.

If you just close the file, without making any changes or saving it, you do not affect the file. BUT… Let’s say you correct the red eye, then save again, choosing the .jpg format. This will compress your photo AGAIN, just like folding it again. On our paper, folding it several times does not make it  impossible to read, but harder, and some of the details in the folds may be hard to make out. And note that the effects are cumulative – the original fold is there also along with the new.

NOW – let’s say you open a photo, fix the redeye and save it. Then you come back later and fix the brightness and save it. Then you change it to B&W, and save it as a different file, but still as a .jpg. THEN you put it on your layout, and save that. THEN you open up that layout, resize it, and save as .jpg again.

If we compressed our paper that much, we’d end up with a crumpled mess – we could still make out what it was, but it wouldn’t be anything we’d want to work with! Same with our jpg file.

The other danger in using jpg is saving it with too much compression right from the start. Did you know you can ruin your picture or layout permanently by using the wrong compression? You can. I often see this when scrappers try to fit their layouts into galleries that have a size limit. It’s too easy to keep sliding the compression slider over to the left to get it under the size you need:

So here are some general guidelines

• Keep the layout or picture in your photo editing program’s native format until you are done. (For Photoshop and Elements that is the .psd file). This is a non-compressed format and you can open and save the file as many times as the national debt and not lose quality!
• Only when you are done and ready to print your layout do you save it as a jpg. A compression level of 10 is fine.
• If you want to post the layout in a gallery – resize it instead of compressing it to get that file size below the limit.

Keep these points in mind so you won’t get squished!

Stan White and his wife Jenn help you navigate the often totally perplexing ins and outs of digiscrapping with Photoshop and PSE at www.scrappersworkshop.com.  Having spent all his adult life in the photo industry, Stan discovered the wild world of digiscrap through wife Jenn (better known as ScrapKitty Design).  Even 12 years of teaching Photoshop and digital imaging to photographers didn’t prepare him for the wild and wooly world of digi-crops, so he sticks to teaching classes and writing about photography and PS/PSE on their blog.  Stan and Jenn are transplanted Yankees in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, and would not live in lake effect snow again if you paid them.