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.

[coredumperror]

@FalrinthI'm just parroting Adobe's likely rationale for this change. If you have such strict requirements, you can use the full Save As dialog to get the tried-and-true 0-12 quality slider. And/Or use an external program to apply further compression.

[BrettN]

The reason why we see a 0-12 slider in Save As Jpg, a 0-100 slider in Save for Web, a 1-100 slider for old Export As, and a 1-7 slider for new Export As is because the jpg engine used in each of these tools is different and each offers different options.

Old Export As was build with a tool set called CEP and the new Export As uses the UXP tool set. Each tool set has a built-in image engine which determines what file types and options for those types are available. My team builds Export As using UXP, but we do not not build UXP itself. So we are working within the restrictions provided to us. There is a separate forum for UXP development where the topic can be further discussed.

Because of how old the CEP technology is and its limitations (it will not, for example, work on ARM machines, hence the inability to use "Legacy" Export As on these machines), we are preparing for its removal from Photoshop. Part of this effort was making the UXP version of Export As the default.

For Quick Export, the quality slider UI is global, it doesn't change when you switch to Legacy. Because UXP is now the default and CEP will be removed, we updated the UI to match this default and future usage. However, it was supposed to map the 1-7 in UXP to the equivalent settings on the 1-100 scale of CEP. Something happened in this implementation and the values did not get mapped right, it does a 1-to-1 instead. This is something we are aware of and want to get fixed. 

I agree that we should be providing more options for a finer degree of control wherever we can in Photoshop. Our first efforts with the UXP Export As, though, was just to get it as close to feature parity with the old version as possible (given the restrictions in place) so that we are at a minimum ready point for the removal of CEP, whenever that should occur (we don't have a date yet, and it may even still be some years off). Now that we have reached that goal, we are looking into ways of improving it, including more controls from what Save for Web has (reaching some level of feature parity a future goal as well). 

[garashi]

In my environment, it is a setting of 1-7 for quick export.
For some reason, when I set it to 1, it is exported in high quality. I'm reluctant, but I support this setting.
But I want the compression ratio to be finely tuned from 1-100. I hope to be able to make adjustments with the same user controls as before.

[chelsea50938769]

@garashi Me too. 1 is the best quality and 2-7 are all very low.

[Falrinth]

@coredumperror  You are right. Forgot its only for these quick saves. However if i recall well, there was an attempt at reducing the quality slider in standard save for web before aswell.

[Earth Oliver]

>This is something we are aware of and want to get fixed. 

@BrettN Given that settings are totally wrong, shouldn't this have been patched immediately? People's jobs depend on not screwing up their output and if jpgs are being unexpectedly overcompressed, that's extremely troubling.
First we had to deal with the bizarre choice of naming the scale instead of numbering, and now the return to #'s has been totally screwed up? Why are we still dealing with so many bugs 7 years after the introduction of Export As?

[coredumperror]

@BrettNThank you for the detailed writeup! That's very informative, and I hope that the fixes you promised can be brought to production ASAP.

Seeing as how the Legacy Export feature is going to be removed at some point in the future, could you please make it so regular Export can be optionally told to always export to the PSD file's directory? Right now it always rememebrs where you last exported a file, which is very annoying for me. I would be able to stop using Legacy Export entirely if regular Export would just stop remembering the last export folder, and always export next to the PSD file.

[Earth Oliver]

@coredumperror You might want to check Prefs>Export...

[coredumperror]

@_earth_oliver_  Unfortunately that setting isn't what I want. It puts the files in an "assets" folder that's next to the PSD. I want the exported files to be directly in the same folder as the PSD.

For whatever reason, you don't have the option to apply the "Export aseets to the location of the current document" setting if you're using Quick Export. Which is the only form of Export I ever use. That setting ONLY works for "Export As".

[Earth Oliver]

@coredumperror  For future reference in case you decide to create a feature request..."Regular Export" is Export As and Quick Export is Quick Export.

[BrettN]

The location preference settings for Export As and Quick Export are similar but with very different wording and one major variation on behavior.

"Ask where to export each time" and "Export assets to the last location specified" have the same intended functionality with very different wording. There was a bug in Quick Export where on first export of a new file it would lose the information of the last location specified. Fixing this is what is resulting in @coredumperror prefering Legacy mode.

Similarly, "Export files to an assets folder next to the current document" and "Export assets to the location of the current document" are mostly the same setting except that Quick Export puts the files in an Asset folder. This is because the Legacy mode of running this feature is essentially just doing a Generator Image Assets export (which only exports files to an asset folder next to the original project file).

Now that we are moving away from Generator and CEP, we should be able to get this changed since it would no longer be a requirement of the underlying technology. It would also be nice to just match the wording between each set of preferences to help avoid confusion on the matter. 

[coredumperror]

Is there ever going to be a fix for this Legacy Export bug, BrettN? We last discussed this in June, it's now October, and the newest version of Photoshop (23.5.1) STILL can't export high quality jpegs using Legacy Export.

Or, if you can't fix Legacy Export, PLEASE add a setting to output the exported file to the same directory as the PSD file. That's all I *actually* want, but only Legacy Export provides that.

[D Fosse]

You don't have this?

[coredumperror]

Oh! Outstanding!! I had completely missed that change to the settings dialog when I had 23.5.1 installed.

I can actually Quick Export how I want now, and get images with good quality out of it! Wonderful!

[coredumperror]

Oh wait... never mind.

That only fixes the Export As function. It doesn't fix Quick Export, which is controlled by the two radio buttons *above* the part of the dialog that you specified. And Quick Export still doesn't have an "export to the same folder as the current document" option.

[D Fosse]

To be clear: you don't have an option for "assets folder next to original document"?

It's the same thing. Quick Export has to go to a separate subfolder, otherwise there would be too much risk of overwriting originals. In a regular Export you can stop and think, while Quick Export just goes ahead and overwrites without warning.

[coredumperror]

> To be clear: you don't have an option for "assets folder next to original document"?

I do. But I don't want to export to an assets folder. I want to export to the same folder as the PSD file. And I almost always want to overwrite any existing file.

> In a regular Export you can stop and think, while Quick Export just goes ahead and overwrites without warning.

That's not the case. When I do a Quick Export, I get a dialog box that lets me choose the filename, and it'll warn me if I choose an existing one. What I want is for that dialog box to always default to the folder in which the PSD file I'm exporting exists. There's no way to do that with the current settings. I can do it for Export As, but not Quick Export.

[ccrampton]

The workaround, choose legacy export is no longer available for me. PS 24.5 Macbook Air 2022. Looks like I can still get to SAVE FOR WEB Legacy though.

[BrettN]

@ccrampton From what I see, it looks like the Macbook Air 2022 is an M1 ARM machine. CEP (the legacy technology the old Export As dialog was built from) is not compatible and thus disabled on such systems. 

[ccrampton]

oh no! I only got this machine because I couldn't teach Photoshop on my older machine. I hope you're wrong about that but I haven't tested the new function like facial recognition yet.

[BrettN]

CEP is our old extensibility platform. Several features were built using it. Due to its age and incompatibility with newer hardware, we are in the process of replacing it with UXP, the current platform. We rebuilt Export As in UXP but we allowed users to return to the CEP version by using the Legacy option. 

Newer features, such as the Neural Filters, which have face-aware options, are built using UXP, not CEP. You should not run into any issues with disabled modern features on more recent models of computers.