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

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). 

@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.

@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.

Is this still broken?

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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

Thank you!

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