Jpeg compression level not remembered in action save.

[ultrachrome]

Sorry...I'm going to have a bit of a hard time explaining when this issue happens.

In my actions, I'll create a Jpeg save at the end with the quality level recorded at 12. I'll do some other work in Photoshop where I'm doing saves at a higher compression/lower quality level not using an action. When i go back to use the action again, it will now be saving at the lower quality setting even though when I recorded the action it was recorded to save at 12. When I look at the details of that part of the action, it still says 12 but In know by the size of the saved file that it's not saving at 12 because it's far too small and if I put a stop on the save, I can see it is now saving at the level of my last edit, not using an action.

To fix this and get the action to start saving properly again, I must open an image, save it at 12, close the image and then close the program. When I reopen the program and run the action, it will now be saving at 12 again.

This is a problem I've dealt with for a very long time on Mac computers but in the last month I switched to PC and have the exact same problem so it's not platform dependent.

Can anyone tell me how to prevent Photoshop from doing this and if not, let me know the wisdom of why it was designed this way? It frustrating to have to check my save in an action every time I use one and there's been many situations I've had to redo work because it was saved at too low of compression because I forgot to check it.

Thanks!

[Daniel E Lane]

Hmmm... I just tried it myself and it worked totally fine. Used the action to save at 12. Then independently saved the same image at 2. Then ran the action again, and it came out exactly the same size as the first image at 12.

So the questions are, what operating system are you running on? What version of photoshop are you running? And what exact steps did you do inside of your action?

[ultrachrome]

"hmm" in deed. I can't make it happen now either but I have about 300 pictures today of a given pixel dimension that were saving at around 16 Mb yesterday and when I checked my edited folder today, they were all down between 2 to 3 Mb.  Grrr...so frustrating. This is the first time I've noticed it happening on my new computer so maybe it was some other kind of error. I know on my Mac I dealt with it for years.  Seems like it might be an intermittent issue. The worst kind.

I'm all up to date on my creative cloud updates so the most current version. Windows 10. In the past, I had the problem with many different OSXes on mac and many different versions of Photoshop.

I saw that a similar question to this was posted a couple of years ago...there was no correct answer there. Ghost in the machine?

[Daniel E Lane]

probably something to do with the computer configurations and a glitch in the Matrix all at once... lol