Getting rid of Jpeg arifacts

[Diminished29]

Alright guys, I'm presenting two pictures which are frustrating me a bit as they're being ruined by jpeg artifacts.

Here is what I did to the original picture in Paintshop 7

#1:

Resized to 800x600

Saturation: Bias - "more colorful", Strength - "normal"

Sharpen: +1

#2

Everything as the first one, however this time I've brought the highlights out more with something called "clairfy" I set this at +2, at the expensive of yet MORE artifacts.

Its very frustrating because I feel that I've really been getting better and better with my composition and I've learned tons from you guys, however now I feel that my main bottleneck now is my lack of knowledge with photo programs suchs as Paintshop and Photoshop.

So, if anyone can give me a bit of insite I'd be great!

Thanks
Chad

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e347/Diminished29/lake1.jpg

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e347/Diminished29/lake2.jpg

[bad81637]

Try using Unsharp Mask instead of Sharpen to see if that makes a difference. USM with the proper Clipping parameter shouldn't affect the sky since there's no contrast.

[Radtech1]

Select the sky, paste it into a seperate layer, Gaussian blur, and erase where it bleeds over the treeline.

Easy.

(You are luck there were no clouds, that makes it a bit harder.)

Rad

http://h1.ripway.com/Radtech1/lake2.jpg

[Robert_Lay]

Alright guys, I'm presenting two pictures which are frustrating me a bit as they're being ruined by jpeg artifacts.



Dear Chad,

You would have to be more specific as to what aspects of your picture are being affected by JPG artifacts.

In order to minimize the artifacts of repeated saves in JPG format, you should immediately convert the image as it comes from the camera to 16 bit mode. Then do all of your processing in 16 bit mode without doing any resizing. The last steps are to resize for the destination and convert back to 8 bit per channel Mode and apply whatever sharpening you want to apply. The very last step is to save as JPG and deliver.

The point of all that is that you do your editing/manipulating/adjusting in 16 bit mode so that you don't have any cross-coupling or non-linearities introduced due to the very limited quantization realm of the 8 bit world. Also, you avoid multiple saves in JPG. You make only the one save ever in JPG format as your last step.

The two things that kill the image when working on it in 8 bit per channel JPG are the limited range of a the 0 to 255 values in each channel and the fact that each separate save in JPG is an irreversible corruption of the image due to lossy compression.

[MTalley]

Very gentle sharpening is required on an 800x600 picture (if at all). Might try sharpening prior to reducing the image size. Notice how "jaggy" the trees look, also.

I usually avoid any pixellated skies (or other smooth areas) when using Photoshop's USM by setting the last parameter to 3 (instead of the default 0). Not sure about your program, though.