Does Picasa degrade photo quality?

[nettsie1015]

One of my photography professors recommended Google's free photo editing software, Picasa, as a basic tool for people who are just starting out and don't have a more advanced software like Photoshop. I have been using Picasa to tide me over until I take a Photoshop class in the spring, and haven't had any problems with it so far. However, I read online recently that every time you save an image on Picasa the program degrades the overall image quality. Does anyone know if that's true? If it is, are there any suggestions for other photo editing software?

[rammy]

Everytime you save a JPG, it is being compressed each time and so you are losing some data each time. You would though need to do a heck of a lot of saves to notice any real difference.

Try GIMP, it is free :-) and save in TIFF format.

www.gimp.org

[Laramie]

Cant say for sure, put for some reasons, the pics I export from Picasa just don't look as good as from Lightroom or PS. THey look a bit degraded to me.

[ghostman]

JPEG uses lossy compression (as opposed to lossless compression), so the fact the image degrades each time you save over your original JPEG is not specific to Picasa. According to the Picasa Help, you can export your images and set a different compression level (I don't use Picasa very much, so I can't say how good it is).

http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=11138
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=11021
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=11067

There is a thing called lossless JPEG, but I don't know if Photoshop even implements that.

[Mike]

Cant say for sure, put for some reasons, the pics I export from Picasa just don't look as good as from Lightroom or PS. THey look a bit degraded to me.

Have a look at the difference in file size when converting RAW - picasa jpegs are half the size. Picasa is great for some things and I use it all the time but for RAW conversions it 'aint great!

[20droger]

May I suggest you try Digital Photo Professional (DPP). It comes with your camera at no extra charge. I do suggest that, after loading it, you upgrade it to the latest version (from the Canon website). The latest version is very nice, very nice indeed.

And it saves to TIFFs or JPEGs.

[nettsie1015]

Thanks for all the responses, they were very helpful! I am updating my DPP version and also checking out GIMP as some alternate options to Picasa. It was good to learn that the problem lies in saving things as JPEG, and not in the Picasa program itself. Thanks again for all the help!!!:)

[hulla]

Whenever you make edits and save a new jpg you get a little loss in quality. However Picasa like many other programs saves a copy of the original jpg.