Why is my picture quality diminishing?

[ssanders20]

Greetings! My wife and I recently had our first baby and became frustrated when our digital camera began to take pictures that were of a lesser quality than we were used to. We had never had any problems before, and I hadn't changed any of the settings; in fact, I started using my parents camera to see if the camera itself was the problem.

Then, I noticed when I altered the photo (eliminate red-eye) or simply changed the file name that the quality diminished. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

[Dylan8i]

if your files are saved in jpeg, every time you re-save it it usually loses some quality. some programs let you set this, and in fact you can lose no quality... another way is to immediately open the file and save it as a tiff or other file format.

[livin4lax09]

actually dylan, in every form of JPEG you are losing some image quality, even saving in photoshop as size 12, but many printers won't be able to pick up the difference. The only way to not diminish the quality at all is to save in a lossless format.

[Medley]

ssanders20, what editing software are you using?

- Joe U.

[another view]

It takes quite a few "saves" to make a .jpg file degrade so much that it's very obvious on a monitor. My guess is that something did get accidently changed. It can happen pretty easy - been there, done that. Check the file size (go for the largest) and quality (go for the highest). Maybe there's some way to reset the camera to factory default settings?

[Dylan8i]

oh hummm.... using arcsoft photostudio when you save as a jpeg it give you the opton of quality, starts at 90, i always bump up to 100, always figured it was % since i never saw any difference.

[Grandpaw]

Probably the file getting cut down each time you adjust the picture is the problem. When I used MGI Photosuite and made one adjustment the file went from 2.4 meg to about 300kb and that is a huge difference.

I noticed on my camera that the pictures right out of the camera weren't as good as they were before. What I discovered causing my problem was that the ISO or ASA setting somehow had gotten changed to a high ISO setting from 100 and when I changed it back could see the difference. This more than likely is not the reason for your problem but you still might want to check it out. Good luck, Jeff

[freygr]

Greetings! My wife and I recently had our first baby and became frustrated when our digital camera began to take pictures that were of a lesser quality than we were used to. We had never had any problems before, and I hadn't changed any of the settings; in fact, I started using my parents camera to see if the camera itself was the problem.

Then, I noticed when I altered the photo (eliminate red-eye) or simply changed the file name that the quality diminished. Can anyone help me solve this problem?

The first thing I would do would be to check the cameras settings.
1) make sure the size setting is still set to the max size ie for a 6 mega pixel camera it should read like 3000 by 2000 pixels
2) make sure the ISO setting is between 50-200 ISO
3) make sure the file save is set correctly it you are using JPG it should be set in Normal, Fine or Super Fine.

After you tansfer to your computer you need to make sure you editing program is saving the files correctly. Never save over your original photo. Copy the files you going to edit to a different location. That way you always can reedit after an oops.