Question about making changes to a photo

macmassey

I am relatively new at all this. I bought my first digital camera that gives me the option of manual settings (Panasonic Lumix FZ20). It was an inexpensive way to get started.

I use Photosuite 7 Platinum Home for photo processing. It's the only program I'm familiar with. I notice that when I make a change to a photo, such as increase the exposure, the size of the picture changes, going from 1 or 2 mb to a few hundred kb, even though the pixel size doesn't change. Does that impact the quality of the picture? To the naked eye I really can't see a difference.

Also I have problems when I have taken a picture with the camera on its side, so that the photo is sideways. Seems when I make an adjustment, it blurs the picture.

Any suggestions for a better photo processing program or might I be doing something wrong in the Photosuite program?

System

Does that impact the quality of the picture?

Yeah, it does.

When you compress a JPEG to save it, you *should* have a quality adjustment 'knob' on your save dialog, and you should probably turn it all the way up.

Just to be clear, you should only ever resave as JPEG for distribution, even if that was the original format: if you're going to do intermediate saves for any reason at all (such as to pass pictures between programs in a workflow), you should do them in a non-lossy format, like PNG, TIFF, or (gasp) CPT.