Whether you have off-the-shelf software or the came-with-the-computer software, great-looking, non-crunchy JPEGs can be yours with the click of a button and just a little patience. Depending on which version of software you own, you may need more or less of the patience part.

What Are "Crunchies"
and Why Are They Evil?

Those are the little abnormal pixelations that can be seen in a low-quality picture. They're evil anytime they detract from your image, especially if it started out as a great-looking one but got mangled somewhere in between scanning and saving it as a JPEG.

A photo-editing program, any program, will only get you so far. It's also going to take a good eye and discernment to choose the best balance of image quality, file size, and download time. And no crunchies.

Using Adobe Photoshop

The benefit of making your graphics with Photoshop is that you can proof your results, compare, and tweak them, all before you save.

Photoshop gives you the option to "Save For Web" (File/Save For Web) which lets you preview the original against versions of proposed images, the file size, the quality, and the approximate time it will take to download.

In this case, the version chosen was the upper right one (bordered). Its quality is good and it's only about 12K. In the bottom left corner is the file saved at the highest quality, which doesn't look noticeably better than the 12K version but is over three times as large (and will take three times longer to download). In the lower right corner is 0 quality — while I'm doing this for emphasis, the crunchy and blurry edges of this one just won't work.

Using Microsoft Photo Editor

Open or create your image in Photo Editor. Once you're ready to make it a JPEG, choose File/Save As and then choose to save it as a JPEG. But before you hit "Save," click the "More" button in the lower left corner.

"More" opens up the box to more options:

The first option is set to Gray Scale, which is fine, since that's what my image is. I get no choice with the second; JPEG compression is what you get (you are, after all, making a JPEG file, right?).

The quality factor slider is what we want to concentrate on here. I've made my image 9 for a truly low-quality JPEG experience. Now click Save.

But my image on the screen looks exactly the same (and pretty darn good). So what did I really change?

This is the tough part… you're not really viewing the file you just saved. In order to get the full view, you need to preview it in an HTML file. And then you will see its low quality in all its crunchy glory:

» Click here for image.

Yuck.

So the only answer is to experiment. The right quality to save as will differ for every single JPEG you make. Dragging the slider all the way to the right may get you a great-looking JPEG with a hefty file size of 40kb — not the greatest tradeoff either. This is not to say you can't make high-quality JPEGs using Photo Editor — but it will require diligence and patience to get the desired result.