A "medium" amount of jpeg compression is generally perfectly acceptable for publishing to a screen. More or less. One gets into difficulties in repeatedly performing operations on images and re-storing as jpeg. Here is one I tortured (well beyond common sense.) Sixteen iterations, removing a row and column of pixels each iteration. [I guess this is one reason I do not worry too much about folks stealing my copyrighted work from 'osity; there is just a limited amount of processing they can do on a downloaded jpeg.]

'course, there are always creative possibilities...

beautiful and i like the creative but the top is prettiest!!

that's why some of the email photos look like mush by the time you get it ;]

That's why I use PSD to work on photos. :-) But I like the third. High pass filter?

This is bizarre! Did you use the same compression factor on each one? I did a similar experiment in which I did not change the crop and did not rotate the image, and compressed/recompressed about 12 times with no perceptible results. mjr.

really really really love no 1... and agree with cindy ...:)

Same compression setting on each one. I also repeated the experiment re-saving a number of times, but doing no other processing. Not sure if there was NO change, but there was significantly less cumlative degradation. Almost as if each little 16X16 block used in the jpeg calculation remains unchanged after a certain point.

Yeah, when you crop and rotate you're changing the quantization function. If you leave the image the shape it's not going to really affect it much. Or it shouldn't. mjr.