I am getting very bad renders when I save them as jpgs as shown in a blown up section on right. When I same them as Photoshop documents they look normal as in blown up render on left. In the PSD-saved blow up I hope you can see the normal pixilation. In the jpg-saved blow up I think you can see that there is a lot more going on! Strange ghosts of boxes and blurred pixels or whatever. I have tried playing with lighting and have not figured out anything that will stop the problem. Maybe someone will recognize it. So now I am assuming that part of my poser 4 program has become corrupted somehow, and thinking that I should reinstall. If I do that, I am afraid that I will have to rebuild the whole set of libraries and textures etc. from scratch. So here are some specific questions. Would it be possible to save the libraries and textures and geometries etc as units? Then simply to replace them after I reinstall poser 4 from the box? Or could I go in and simply replace programs associated with rendering and saving renders? If so, what are these? I am not up to anything that is not simple when it comes to files, let alone changing scripts or anything like that. Can anyone help me with any aspect of this problem?

When saving JPEG files from Poser, it should ask you for a quality setting. I think the default is very low, something around 20. Try a higher setting, I usually use 90 or 95 for JPEG, it should look much better then. In general, JPEG is a lossy format, so especially when you want to edit your image after rendering, go with a lossless format like PNG, TIFF or PSD.

When you save a jpg in poser it saves it very compressed by default. I had the same problem to start with. To fix it change the quality to 90 or 95. This is a question that could be in a faq for new users as well as the one about adding new figures without deleting others and a few other questions.

Stewer beat me by 2 seconds :)

Stewer and xantor are right.

I think that did it! Somehow the quality level was set at 25. I have never had the problem before in hundreds of renders, and so I don't even think about it. I must have changed it accidentally without noticing. Oddly, the brightness on my monitor also got dim around the same date. New icons on my desktop. Hmmmmmmmm. Coincidences, junk in, or something internal? Maybe I am getting up and using the computer in my sleep.Anyway after one render at 95 the problem looks fixed. So thanks very much!

For the record, something else is going on too. Maybe that screwed up the quality settings. Now after a couple of improved renders as above, I find that every couple of renders all my menus across the top, render, display, etc. pull down off (unbold) and unresponsive. When this happens lines indicating the directions of light also are in the document window. Then it looks like it is going to render, but does not. Then I check the menu at the top and the items are embossed, off, unbold, rather than dark and responsive to clicking. So I may have to reinstall anyway. If there are any suggestions, please let me know.

It looks like you do have to reinstall. You could uninstall it and leave the figures etc that you have on and reinstall in the same place to save you a lot of time.

I save my JPG's at 85% quality so that the file sizes are small (50KB for a 1024x768 image) and the image quality is still really good. www.shonner.com

Also sounds like a problem I see when Poser 4 is running low on memory - menus don't work render dialod stays forever but no render etc. Probably more likely if you're using an older OS like 98 or ME. Closing Poser and restarting will usuallf fix the problem so save before rendering. I suspect that Poser may have a memory leak that gets progressively worse as you use it. If you're using P5 I don't know if this is still a problem.

I get that problem at times when I export wavefront objects. I use windows 98. I just close poser and restart and it usually works ok.

believe me, i dont know why (maybe contrast and ligthing) but sometimes even at 100% jpeg quality, i have flawy jpegs, i mean with blurred/messed outlines or border of figures, and some artifacts... i am only on poser 4 though, but i can swear the jpeg dll algorythm used to save image is just too low... I have to save them in psd compressed, but my paint software cannot read it, and the software that can would crash if i would put the picture into the clipvboard (due to its size), and my other software has a low jpg save routine too (but not as low as poser..) so i got to go through PNG first :) man it is insane ...

Attached Link: http://www.irfanview.com/

Riddokun,maybe you can use Irfanview. It's a very nice freeware image viewer/converter that will read the psd format and convert to jpg, tif or whatever. I've never really tested their jpg compression though. Win98 is always going to be troublesome with a memory intensive application like Poser. You need to kill as many running applications as possible, including those peaky background apps before starting Poser to maximise the memory available to it. Even if you have a lot of physical RAM, 98 can't manage it very well. You can also get the free Cacheman program (I think CL has a link on their site) that will help reclaim unused memory as well.

hmm i know irfan view, but i dropped it to use xnview instead... . Jpg compression is fair but nothing else.. So i use it only for what he does well... Yes w98 handle the RAM like for example a cow would handle a bicycle :) I already use something like cacheman or similar, and most of all, i removed the damn IE from the whoel thign and use a more reliable shell and browser instead... It saved me from lot of trouble, but thing is, poser 4 is slow and a bit buggy (though poser 5 is worse) and if you have too many figures or too big textures loaded, you can bet on a crash or a freeze :)

Like xantor I somtimes get the greyed-out menues after exporting or importing obj format. Using Poser 4 on a AMD Athlon-PECM 1066 MHz, with 256 MB RAM, & Windows 98 SE.