Strange grainy effect when I save a retouched photo...Help Please

[Colin Patrick]

Hi, I would really appreciate any help. I'm retouching photos and whenever I save a file.. the image looks a little strange compared to the original... it looks kind of grainy and off. In the attachments I have with this post... the left image is the edit and the right image is the original to illustrate the difference in image quality. My employer tells me to retouch them (I only use levels, contrast, color correct, saturation, and healing brush tool) and then crop them down to 5x7 at 300 resolution and then go into image size and change the width to 6.5 inches so that the pixels are under 2000 pixels on the longest side. Any saving options that can save the image quality better so it doesn't look as digitized?

 

[Tom Mann]

Unfortunately, screen shots are not very helpful when it comes to identifying subtle changes in image quality. This is for a variety of reasons. Similarly, the in-line mid-sized previews generated by this forum's software are also not very useful for ID'ing issues of image quality because they compress the living daylights out of images.

This means that I have to exclude the two screen shots you included as in-line images from consideration. So, excluding these, I'm only left with the single "attached" image to work from, and nothing to compare it to.

Because of this, could you pls. post the original of the image (ie, full rez, before you ever touched it) as an attachment. Pls. make sure it is labeled as "original", not just with time-stamp. If the original exceeds 3500px on its longest side, just zip it and post the zip file. Doing so gets around the forum's 3500 px limit for images. Hopefully, with that in hand, we'll be able to say something definitive about your workflow.

Thanks.

Tom M