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.

[fuzenco]

I'll ad, convert to sRGB and emped profile was selected.

[TheDigitalDog]

In preferences, set Legacy Export and try that instead:

[fuzenco]

My goodness that did it. Thank you.

[fuzenco]

There has to be a combination of things that the new export is handling too aggresively. Quality settings at 7 isn't sufficient or 7 is now treating it much lower than the previous Good or Excellent settings. “Great” from what I remember was the highest setting.

Again thanks.

[fuzenco]

One thing I‘m noticing in the legacy setting is that having Convert to sRGB checked _doesn't_ change the preview window to reflect an sRGB space. I’m certain in the previous Save As dialog box that having that checked did indeed make the picture appear as if it was converted to sRGB and not whatever color profile the picture was being edited in.

[TheDigitalDog]

One thing I‘m noticing in the legacy setting is that having Convert to sRGB checked _doesn't_ change the preview window to reflect an sRGB space.
By @fuzenco

Correct. It is a bug, I've reported it to Adobe. IOW, the 'soft proof' isn't working but still check it, the image will get converted correctly to sRGB. Keep the check box on as if off, the soft proof is even farther off! And of course, you want the conversion to sRGB.

[fuzenco]

Beautiful! As I suspected. Thanks for confirming I wasn't going crazy.

Lastly—I know you’re respected in the field…I remember reading your book—can you get Adobe to finally include “Embed sRGB” in the Photoshop > Preferences > Export (Quick Export) settings?! For years I’ve been clamoring for it. It’s already in the Save As dialog box but having it in Quick Export (as an option) would mean I could finally use Quick Export. The only reason I haven't (and can’t) these past few years is because there's no option to embed the profile. And from my understanding, browsers that see the sRGB embeded profile will respect it. The ones that don’t will assume what they want and so be it.

[TheDigitalDog]

That’s a bug too, it should embed sRGB.

[fuzenco]

For crying out loud.

My original post from 2018 and at that time I'd learned to live with it for more than 3-4 years:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/quick-export-with-color-profile/m-p/9...

[TheDigitalDog]

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/

[fuzenco]

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.

[IrinaM1]

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! 

[BrettN]

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.

[Andy Higgins]

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.

[fuzenco]

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.

[fuzenco]

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 🙂

[BrettN]

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. 

[BrettN]

@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. 

[fuzenco]

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

[fuzenco]

Excellent. This would cause me grief previously when creating thumbnails for web galleries. Thanks for your work on this.

[katayanagi51]

「クイック書き出し」のJPGフォーマットについてです。

Photoshop v23.3 では，環境設定で「従来の「書き出し形式」を使用」にチェックが入っていると，「クイック書き出し」したJPG画像のクオリティが著しく低い。

画質レベル「7」，つまり，最高画質にしても汚い画像しか書き出せないので，改善してほしい。
また，画質レベル「1 - 7」で設定するのではなく，v23.2.2 のように「1% - 100%」で設定できるようにしてほしい。

（Windows10）

[katayanagi51]

んー。マージされてしまいましたが、問題としているのはそういうことではないので、不本意です。

23.3では最高画質に設定しても「従来の「書き出し形式」を使用」にチェックを入れていると使い物にならないJPGしかクイック書き出しできないので、23.2.2の状態に戻してほしいのですよ。

[BrettN]

Google translate of the last two posts: 

  About the JPG format of "Quick Export".

  In Photoshop v23.3, the quality of "quick export" JPG images is significantly lower when "Use conventional" export format "" is checked in the preferences.

  The image quality level is "7", that is, even if the image quality is the highest, only dirty images can be exported, so please improve it.
  Also, instead of setting the image quality level to "1-7", I want you to be able to set it to "1% -100%" as in v23.2.2.

  (Windows10)

And:

  Hmm. It's been merged, but that's not the problem, so I'm reluctant.

  In 23.3, even if you set the highest image quality, if you check "Use conventional" export format "", you can only quickly export JPGs that are useless, so I would like you to return to the state of 23.2.2.

@katayanagi51, the recent changes to Export As regarding JPG quality are discussed in this thread and this seems the appropriate place to continue this same discusion, which is why the post was merged. 

A while back, we changed the default method of using Export As to working with the new UXP-based method. The older CEP-based method (which used to be the default) is now activated by enabling the "Use Legacy" option in Preferences.

One of the big differneces between the two methods is the Quality setting for JPG files. In CEP, it used a API which allowed for a 1-100% quality scale, which is similar to the one used by Save For Web. UXP has an API which only allows for a scale of 1-7, which is similar to what is used in Save As. This scale is equivalent to approximately 15-20% jumps on the old scale. So 7 on the new scale is the same as 100% on the old, 6 is around 80%, and so on. Unfortunately, this is not something we can readily change, we are reliant on another piece of technology for this feature and are currently restrained by its limitations. 

The 1-7 scale is a more recent UI change, from the old descriptors scale (Poor, Good, Great, etc). We only changed these labels to numbers, to make it easier to understand. We didn't change anything at all about the underlying JPG compression: 7 is exactly the same as Great and so on. 

In your screen shots, we see exactly what we expect to see: 7 (from a scale of 1-7) in the new UXP settings ("Legacy" setting is off) is high quality. But 7 using (from a scale of 1-100) in the old CEP settings (Legacy is on) is low quality. 

[katayanagi51]

この不具合は，日本語版のみで発生するのでしょうか？

英語版では再現しないのでしょうか？

Windows10Pro(20H2)/Photoshop v23.3 日本語版では，「従来の「書き出し形式」を使用」にチェックが入っていても，チェックが入っていなくても「クイック書き出し形式」のスケールは「1-7」です。「1-100」ではありません。ですから，私はいずれの場合も「1-7」の中から選ぶことしかできません。

そして，「従来の「書き出し形式」を使用」にチェックが入っている場合は，高品質であるはずの「7」を選んでも「クイック書き出し」では低品質の画像しか書き出されないのです。

上記説明で，ご理解いただくことはできませんか？

[BrettN]

Thanks for the additional details. I now see what you are talking about. Looks like the values are incorrectly mapped. We'll investigate what is going on.