Reply To: InDesign/Prepress Myths

Myth: The loss of quality and the amount of compression artifacts grows exponentially every time you open an re-save an jpeg image.

Fact: The Lion's Share of quality loss happens the first time an image is compressed with jpeg algorythm. As long as you don't crop, rotate or resample the image each subsequent time you save the image again further losses approaching to zero –  even if you do some color changes. The second and third time some changes may happens, but afterwards there is no additional quality loss visible an nearly not measurable.

Myth: If you get jpeg images, you should save them to tiff bevor using them in prepress.

Fact: No. The quality loss that once happens is irreversible. You just get more Megabyte. And jpeg can every prepress-key-feature (cmyk, icc-profiles, clipping-path) you need.