JPG quality very poor when using ACR

[Mike Yang]

Greetings,

I've got some JPG's that I've been editing using Bridge/ACR. I perform the edits on "original.jpg" and then save out the file with a maximum quality (level 10) to a different filename "new.jpg". The new.jpg photo, when viewed in a non-Adobe viewer (such as Picasa photo viewer) looks much worse. The "blockiness" that you get with jpg compression is much more visible. It seems that ACR is applying a significant amount of jpg compression to the saved image even though I requested the maximum quality. I realize that re-saving a JPG file in JPG format results in data loss, but I am truly surprised by how bad it looks. However, if I look at new.jpg in Adobe Bridge, it looks good.

I don't recall having this issue show up when using other editors (such as Picasa and GIMP). Has anybody else experienced this issue with ACR?  I would prefer to use ACR because I am reasonably familiar with it. I cannot stay entirely within the Adobe family (e.g. by using Lightroom) because I might choose to share these picture files with others, and because I use IDimager as my cataloging software.

Also, if anybody could suggest things to try (ACR settings?) or workarounds (other jpg editing software?) that would be fantastic.

thanks!
Mike

[Mike Yang]

A quick follow up... I wrote out the file as an uncompressed TIFF and the output tiff looks identical to the output jpg when viewed with Picasa photo viewer.