Hi all, I was wondering why when I save my image as Jpg and Gif (as required by this site to upload in the gallery)my images look bad. JPG isn't so bad, but it's still not a good clear picture lik when I save as bmp etc. And with gif, forget it. It totally ruins the image. How do others get around this? What do I need to change, or what am I doing wrong? Thanks!

What software are you using? Clint

GIF is restricted to 256 colours. If your image has a lot more than that, it will look anything from not very good to appalling.

With JPEG, the critical thing is the degree of compression. JPEG loses data to achieve the levels of compression it does, so if you have a high compression set then your images may look poor. Are you using Poser - this by default sets a very high compression (i.e. low quality)? A better bet is to save as a TIF, PSD, or PNG, then convert to JPEG in a bitmap editor like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, which will give much more control over the compression process and give much better results.

If you are using poser and saving as jpg, it will save at 25% quality by default, you need to manually select 100% quality. If you're not using poser then I don't know!!!

If your using Poser, I save all my renders as a TIF file. Then I take it into Photoshop and do my editing. Or you can just take it to photoshop (If you have it) and convert it to a JPG. Saving a JPG in Poser almost always turns out at a low quality. Ryuslilangel

If you have Photoshop, then Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature can't be beat. It provides excellent compression while retaining superb screen-image quality. You can generate a .TIF file -- or a .PSD file -- and then use "save for web" to save the file as a .jpg with great quality for uploading.

Thanks everyone I will try all these ideas! What I have been doing, is working the image in Poser, then doing a screen shot from poser, then cropping it in just regular Paint. That worked fine until I tried to save as jpg. I do have Photo Shop but I am not too familar with it. Every time I tried opening my image in there, it shrunk the image by a lot, and I haven't figure out yet how to keep the original size. Maybe I will have to look more into it.........

Do you mean your rendering the image and then doing a "screen grab". If so it's no wonder you're getting poor results! When your render is finished go to "file", "Save as" and then select from the drop down list the format to save it as, I use png so I can use layers and stuff more effectively in photoshop and then once you're done in photoshop or whatever you're using, then save it as a jpg for uploading. Cheers, no disrespect intended. If I misunderstood your "screen shot" comment then just ignore me like most do!! thefixer, poser coord.

Photoshop doesn't shrink the image. It just fits it into a screen. Go to the menu/view, and you'll see zoom in/zoom out/fit on screen/show actual pixels. Save dor web is pretty good. I prefer PSP's jpeg function more myself, but I have used Photoshop's save for web when a smaller file size was required. I prefer TIFFs rather than PNGs, but that's because I do a lot of texture work, and it really comes down to personal preference. You don't really need to make your thumbnails gif files, they can be jpegs, they just have to come in at nore more than whatever the file size here is, 15k or something like that.

I always save my images as PSD's and do any work in PSP 7. From there I use the JPG optimizer and I have greater control of the quality I save with.

" I do have Photo Shop but I am not too familar with it" That's a lot of money to spend on software to be "not too familar with."

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