Does enhahcing digital photos reduces quality???

Hi guys!

I have a habit of enhancing my digital photos (jpeg format) in a image editing software. Does this degrade the quality of the photos???

Thank you.

The short answer is yes. In reality, some commands discard information, and some do not. Generally speaking, the commands that affect the entire image, such as Levels or Curves, are more lossy than say, a subtle color adjustment.

Still, even with jpeg, you have some room to play. The human eye can discern about 200 variations in tone, and jpeg starts with 255.

One of the biggest advantages of using the Raw format is that it starts with 4096 variations in tone, and several of the first edits are lossless. This gives you a huge amount of leeway.

With jpeg, the most important thing you can do to preserve your image is to only resave the image one time. If you're goint to be doing edits over several days, then save the image in psd format until you're sure you have a final version.

Hope this helps.

- Joe U.

You can also save it as a Tiff. Tiff files are also lossless.