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

[fuzenco]

Today I update Photoshop to the latest (23.2) and now the Export As dialog does a miserable job on export quality. Even at the highest setting of 7, the pictures saved to web as JPG are _signiciantly_ bad. Just a day before—before I updated—the quality was no problem and the norm of what I had expected for the last few years.

Now, it’s so bad I have to figure out a workaround. This is not good with a week of critical photo work to bang out.

[D Fosse]

7 not being treated as max, but as 7%.

[TheDigitalDog]

I'll try this soon (not home):

Quick Export two times. 7 set in prefs.

1. Legacy on.

2. Legacy off.

Compare. 

Sound right?

[D Fosse]

Yep 😉

[coredumperror]

Yes, that will trigger the bug. Legacy On will be a much worse quality JPG than Legacy Off.

[TheDigitalDog]

OK, breaking news <g>

Quick Export two times. 7 set in prefs.

1. Legacy on.

2. Legacy off.

The only difference is this checkbox:

There IS a difference when I subtract the two:

And even though the image was in sRGB, in both cases, the resulting JPEG opens untagged. Yet another bug (stripping out an existing sRGB profile). 

I will file an internal pre-release bug report and upvote here.

[coredumperror]

Excellent! I'm glad you managed to replicate the issue.

I'm looking forward to a fix. 🙂

[D Fosse]

Right.

And the Export preview is still not correctly color managed.

On the other hand, the "embed profile" checkbox now sticks, which is excellent.

One step forward, one step backward. one step sideways and left foot out. We'll get there eventually 😉

[StevenJaeger]

It felt like a huge step back in time when a saw the new PS release and the way I know must compress jpg files, with a number from 1 to 6. I remember this was the way it used to be for hundred years ago.

Now PS users completely have lost the control over fine tuning the file size for web output. This was really bad news because compression is something I do almost every day - and the ability to fine tune file size/quality are so extremely important. What are PS thinking??

Please - vote back something that worked fine!

Steven

[Marianne-Deiters]

What change do you mean exactly? I can't see any. There are so many possibilities: When saving, when exporting (1 to 7), in Save for web?

[Earth Oliver]

Good grief. For how many more years will Export As be bugged and mostly useless? It's already been more than 6 years and i can't think of any time within that span when it hasn't been.

[peterm25153756]

Hi, I wonder if anyone else has had this issue.

When i use quick export as a jpeg, the file is being reduced in size, not dimensions as the highest saving value is 7. I am getting a file of about 150kb when ordinarily i would get a 3mb file.

I have 2 Imacs running identical set ups , on my other Mac i can adjust the save value to 12 in preferences which gives me the larger file size  but the other has removed this option and 7 is the max

Grateful for any advice.

PM

[D Fosse]

Just different number of steps in the scale. 7 equals 12.

With jpeg compression, maximum on the scale is not the same as maximum quality! The jpeg algorithm is always destructive and non-reversible, even at the max setting. That's the price for the small file size.

[clifton_santiago]

peterm25153756,

Yes, this is an obvious error that Adobe has made a couple point releases ago. In a separate thread, I tried to explain how this was broken from how it was previously, and demonstrated it until I was blue in the face. Everyone kept telling me I was wrong, or that the problem was intentional and by design.

Until Adobe acknowledges the problem, and fixes it, you need a workaround: Select Legacy Export As in the Export settings, and then always use Export As instead of Quick Export.

[garashi]

私は1-7しか選べない書き出し設定画面になっていますが、なぜか「1」だと画質がいいです。

完全にバグだと思います。

[peterm25153756]

Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply.  As  i said i have 2 Macs, 1 at home , 1 at studio. Ill need to check that both are running precisely the same update as the problem only appears to be on my home machine. Will report back.Im aware of the work arounds, Use.. 'Save as' or 'Export save as' but neither are the same in terms of work flow.

Cheers

[peterm25153756]

Incorrect . This was not the case a month ago.. I could 'Quick Export from a CR3 sized at 3000px file with a value of 12 that would give me an approx jpg of 3000kb. I do not want a file 3000px with a file size of 150kb

[clifton_santiago]

Exactly. That is the bug. You now have to use Legacy Save As instead, to get the same results as before.

[D Fosse]

Ah, apologies everyone, you're all absolutely correct - as I acknowledged myself back in April. I just forgot:

[peterm25153756]

I believe you are correct and turning off legacy solves the problem

Thank you!

[clifton_santiago]

Okay. But what if you want to use Quick Export, for full-size exports, and then Export As for smaller exports for web? I do this for almost every image I edit, an I prefer the Legacy settings in Export As.

So, if I want to use both in my workflow, I have to Quick Export, then turn on Legacy in Settings, then use Export As. Then on the next image, turn off Legacy in Settings, Quick Export, turn on Legacy in Settings, Export As, and repeat that procedure a couple dozen times daily.

[coredumperror]

This is STILL BROKEN as of 2022.4.1, the new release from this week. If you have Legacy Export enabled and you do a Quick Export, you get a super low quality JPEG no matter how high you set the quality setting.

Please fix this ASAP.

[Falrinth]

For the love of God, why fixing stuff that works well... T_T Why every photoshop update must have this forcefully pushed changes that are always horrible like this one? Taking away more and more control from the user, and trying to turn proffesional tool into casual instagram-filters-like dumbed down software step by step? 😞 (I assume intention was to take away 1-100 quality slider and replace it with 1-7 steps slider, but something went wrong - aka without quality assurance step?)

[coredumperror]

What seems to have happened is that they changed the 0-100 slider to a 1-7 slider with the intent of simplifying it, since nobody really has any use for more than 7 levels of quality granularity. But they screwed up by forgetting to translate 0-100 to 1-7 in the Legacy Export mode, resulting in the maximum quality of Legacy Exported jpgs being 7 out of 100, instead of 7 out of 7.

And since Legacy Export mode is the ONLY way to make Quick Export consistently exported the image to the same folder as the PSD file, more people are using Legacy Export than Adobe probably expected. If you use Quick Export without Legacy mode, the default export folder is the last folder you exported to, rather than whatever folder the PSD file is in.

I never, EVER want to export a jpg to a different folder than the PSD, so I use Legacy Export mode.

[Earth Oliver]

Is this still broken?

[Falrinth]

@coredumperrorJust because you dont use the 0-100 slider very carefully choosing quality/weight doesnt mean "noone does". When working with ads, publishers sometimes have very strict weight limits - different countries, different publishers, and its often gymnastics with weight optimization, like detail reduction, masked blur and so on, combined with that 0-100 JPG slider to salvage most quality out of the small weight limit. And very often 1% makes a difference when you are dealing with salvaging diseaster in quality.