Ok, when I render something and save it as a jpg there are squigle lines and distortions around the figure. How do I get rid of that so that I can keep the good view I made in the render?

If you're not careful, you'll end up saving jpg files at something like 40. When the save dialog pops up, look at the very bottom. There's a window there where you can change the quality. Mine is at 100.

You get far better compression of you set the quailty in the 95-99 range, at 100 you may as well save it as a tiff as a jpg. You can get some very decent (and small) images at 99% especially if the scene has a lot of black :P later jb

Actually, at 100 I find the images saved are still way smaller than they would be as a TIF, by almost a factor of 10 sometimes.

That's definitely a compression problem. I save as psd for photoshop and work there. Then I set the compression ratio in either PS or Image Ready.

In Image Ready I can usually save at 60 without problems-- 80 or 75 if I really want to. Check my gallery, I dont' think I have any jpeg pixelation-- except before I learned to used alpha channels on the damned rendered backgrounds. If you need to use 100, you haven't got a very effective jpg maker. IMO. Emily

Rendering with Poser I save with 90%, with PaintShop I use 15 (the inverse 100 - 85%), quality above 90% doesn't make any visual difference, so saving with 100% is a vaste of filesize. The only problem with jpeg is when you have small pictures 200x200 or less like thumbs, here you need to increase the quality to 95-98% for very small sizes and many times gif produce better results.

I hate what Poser does with JPEG output - and its file size is huge for a given quality - so I always save at 100%, and re-compress in Photoshop. I recorded some Photoshop macros to re-save a file at JPEG 7 or 8. They look as good as Poser's 90%, at a fraction of the size! -- ToolmakerSteve

Don't you save in Tiff with Poser? It's much better output and there's the benefit of the alpha channel. Emily

Save the file as Photoshop (psd), then open it in Photosjop and use Photoshop to compress the file: either Save As a jpg, or if it's small enough, Save For Web as a gif.