I was wondering if anyone can tell me what I am doing wrong here.

In Photoshop
I took a portion of a picture cut it out and moved it over to another picture - once I did that the picture of the cutout became very degraded - I cannot figure out what to do to prevent this. Can anyone give me some suggestions?

Where you working with the orginial image or a compressed copy?

It makes a major difference. Always work from the orginial and never compress (save optimized or save for the web) until you are completely finished.

Also gif to jpg does not always work very well. Best to with gif to gif or jpg to jpg.

What version of Photoshop ?
Do you have your preferences set to scale on copy/paste ?

LadynRed,

I use 6.0 default install, no mods. Is there something I should know?

Originally Posted by Mystical Pippin

I took a portion of a picture cut it out and moved it over to another picture - once I did that the picture of the cutout became very degraded - I cannot figure out what to do to prevent this. Can anyone give me some suggestions?

Is degraded a technical term?

It sounds to me as though the picture you are pasting the cutout section into is a GIF. Look under image > mode. What is the mode of your image? If it's indexed colour switch it to RGB. If it's CMYK switch it to RGB.

Ok - here's what I was using. Photoshop CS1. I had an original artwork piece I was putting together. I had drawn & painted the background and had place a few other pics in it. This file was saved as a photoshop file. Then I took a picture I had gotten off the net it was a jpg and I took the background out of it and saved it as a gif. then I went to place it in my photoshop file and that's when it fell apart.

I had to make it a gif because I had taken out the background - should I have made this a photoshop file too and then moved it over into the other photoshop artwork?

And thanks for any help or suggestions

btw this was ALL done in RGB mode because the piece was for the web.

I don't think "degraded" is a technical term I don't really know... it was just the word I thought of to best describe how it looks once I moved it into my art piece....when I say degraded I mean the picture looked like all wobbly and rough in texture - it had an almost transparent look to it - it definately looked different from the other pics I put into the piece - they were all fine except for this one - I'll try and post it here in a little while.

Ok here it is... this was a submission for a contest on the wiki boards. I came in third...

on the far right the logo is completely degraded in my opinion. It looks wobbly and grainy. When enlarged it looked even worse.

Unfortunately they did not choose to use the one below for the contest, which IMO was much better.

If you saved a PHOTO as a gif you're going to get an ugly result. Gifs are best for solid color graphics.

I always save images in photoshop native psp to prevent any quality loss, when i have the whole work done i export to a compressed format. But always keep the psd to allow further layer editing.

I tried to clean it up a little for you.
See if you like this one better.

Rich, Yes that is alot better. Can you tell me how you did this?. This is exactly what I am asking help in.

Halo, I am talking about as soon as I moved the pic into my PHOTOSHOP file it became degraded. I had not saved it yet. I do save a file in the orginal format ALWAYS I only save JPEGS and GIFS as a copy because I may want to change something at some point. The problem again I will say is not in the JPEGS or GIFS it is the ORIGINAL ARTWORK FILE that I am having an issue with.