William, whenever you save a picture as a jpg, it loses information. It's a compression scheme to take up less room on a hard drive and still look OK to the eye. Editing and saving it again loses yet more info. On most software, you are able to override the amount of compression. One thing to do is simply copy the file as it comes off the camera and work on a backup file for editing, and leave the original alone. This way you can always go back to the better resolution and redo changes. When doing your first editing, like color and brightness enhancement, you can save it at a very high setting so the file is big, and the compression is low. You can experiment with reduction in size and compression until you get good results. Again, save only when necessary, so you don't further compress a compressed file. I've found pretty good results at a compression rate of 85%, and compressing more than that usually leaves visible artifacts in the picture. You notice the lower quality most on the hard interface between something light and dark, and the line will appear fuzzy or rippled.
] I'm using MS Paint... I need help...[:I]
