P: Inconsistent JPEG quality with 1-7 slider in Export As

Thank you for that thorough response. My biggest takeaway: I'll start at the 6 setting and go from there. Much appreciated.

@fuzenco Yes, we did fix a bug with the math so that it can be more precise when changing dimensions. It used to be restricted to 2 decimal points, which could cause some issues when doing some conversions. 

The old JPG Quality settings were as follows: Very Poor, Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, Excellent, and Great. They are ordered from lowest quality to hightest quality. But that wasn't clear from these names. Is Great really better than Excellent? In this case, yes it was. We have simply changed to numbering 1-7, with a slider which clearly marks the ends as Low and High. The order of the words corresponds 1-to-1 with the 1-7 scale (1 is Very Poor, 7 is Great, and so on). We didn't change how any of this actually applies to the files it generates, just changed the naming to make it more clear which is the best option.

We also changed the default value from Good/4 to Excellent/6. This second best setting is more in line with the use of 10 as the default quality in Save As. 7 can often double the size of your JPG from 6 with almost no visible change in quality. 

We've never had a feature which used a 1-10 scale for JPG quality. Save As JPG uses a 0-12 scale, Save for Web uses 0-100%, and the Legacy Export As uses a 1-100% scale. These differences are due to the use of separate APIs with different compression options. Each is a product of the time when we incorporated it, as these support technologies are always progressing and changing. There is some talk internally of consolidating the APIs so that we get unified behavior across all channels, but there is a lot of work and decision making that must be made in order for that to happen. It is no simple task to replace the Save As code with the same code Export As uses. Doing so will make those who have been using Save As for decades but never touched any of the export options quite upset and confused (look at all the discussion we are having here around simply changing Export As words to numbers). 

To be more clear, 1-7 in Export As do not corresponde to 1-7 in Save As. The maximum and minimum for each are equivalents. Since there are 13 steps in Save As, which is almost twice as many as in Export As, it means each Export As is approximately the same as every other Save As (7=12, 6=10, 5=8, etc). But because each is using a different algorithm you won't get identical results for each. 

In regards to my last paragraph, all settings were the same including Bicubic Automatic as the resampling. And no, I’m not complaining about a more precise width being saved 🙂

In your defense, I think the new quality settings skewed my perception. Right now it’s ambiguous as to which of the previous settings (good, great, excellent) correlate to the new single-number approach. But honestly, I don't know if the new numbering approach is any more clearer. Semantically, the word approach conjured up some meaning. I think that’s why rating systems have a tough trouble deciding between 3 stars versus a 5-star approach. It feels subjective in a different manner than the wording approach did. It is what it is, though. But like another commentor pointed out: why do other parts of your app go as high as 12?! It’s so much all over the map that it’s hard to understand what do to do. If I’m batch processing, which quality setting matches a 6 in the new Save As dialog? Because on a scale of 1–12, a 6 doesn’t seems that great versus a 6 on a 1–7 scale.

One thing I noticed just now because I was comparing outputs at 6 versus 7 versus the legacy Save As, is the wonky behavor of removing or retaining pixels. If I save the same picture from legacy vs the new Save As and set the Image Size at 1400 width, the new way saves as (1400x967). But if I do the same in legacy, it saves at 1401x965. This became apparent as I had all 3 images open with Match All (zoom and focus point). I noticed a shift on-screen which was weird as everything should have been dead on.

Does that mean Quality 7 is the new 10 (sometimes 12, sometimes Excellent, othertimes 100%), or are higher resolutions only available under the Legacy Export? Please; just one dialogue that does everything so we don't have to double-guess. One to ten is fine; percentages were an unnecessary granularity.

We only changed the labeling for the quality settings, not anything about what was going on behind the scenes. Labels like "Good" and "Great" and "Excellent" were far too vague to have any real meaning and were just confusing. So we just numbered them instead, so it is much clearer what is the highest and what is the lowest value. 7 is identical to Great, the compression process is unchanged.

hello, and sorry you're seeing issue with Export As

Could you give us more information to help to reproduce and troubleshoot this issue? Could you PM me the file you're exporting from, and screenshots of settings in Export As dialog? 

Thank you! 

I tried Hazel before, years ago, to auto organize my downloads. I loved it but for some reason I didn’t buy it after the trial. I may have to rethink it based on our conversation.

With regards the sRGB embeds, you ever feel like Adobe is trolling us?! LOL. Hear me out…

Way back when as a way of addressing this I thought…self, since the new (at the time) Save As dialog has the embed sRGB checkbox, the solution is…create a PS Action that records the steps of the export with our friend sRGB checked.  And assign it a shortcut. Solves everything! Except…PS doesn’t recognize the new Save As whereas the (previous?) legacy Save for Web could be recorded. LOL. I gave up. I truly did.

No excuse for Adobe, but there are far too many app's that don't embed a profile, like everytime on my Mac, I make a screen capture. So I ended up with Hazel which is super powerful and provides all kinds of functionality but it can assign and convert color spaces, move items, convert to JPEG etc, all using Automator actions and such. I make a screen capture as you saw today. It assigns my display profile to the TIFF, copies it to another folder, converts to sRGB, makes a JPEG. All automatically. It is awesome.

https://www.noodlesoft.com/