Major Quality loss when editing in Iphoto 09

Hi,
I am a new user to Imac and Iphoto and I saw that when I edit an Image in Iphoto, I loose a lot of my original data.
I have found that I can return to the original picture, but I wish to edit (especially using the CROP function) then print the Image on 20x30 cm size and therefore I need all the quality I can get.
When I Crop either JPEG or .RAW formatted images (for example 10 MBytes in size) even if I select the COMPLETE image, I am left with only 4 or 5 Mbytes of data.
It gets much worse when I really Crop a part of the picture.
A 12 Mega pixel photo should supply sufficient data to cover a complete wall, but for some reason a lot of quality is lost when I use any of the editing features.
Am I doing something wrong ?
Should I change any of the settings ?
Thanks for your advice

Welcome to the Apple Discussions.
the only difference is that Iphoto took my quality !!
Are you basing the "quality" loss on visual appearance of the photo or on the resulting size of the jpeg file? If it's the latter that is really not an accurate method. True, some information is lost with a jpeg edit and save (only the first edit in iPhoto results in additional jpeg compression) but, in my experience, you would have to print a VERY large print before seeing any noticeable image degradation. I've compressed jpegs as high as 60%, i.e. a quality setting of 40, and for most all uses up to 5x7 prints haven't seen noticeable image degradation. However, I realize image quality is subjective and open to individual interpretation.
So unless you are visibly seeing image degradation I wouldn't worry about the file size reduction, especially in iPhoto as it's compressed only once no matter how many edits are made and saved. Apple uses a compression algorithm that gives the best image quality for the amount of compression it uses.
The following is from the Usernet FAQ site article "JPEG image compression FAQ, part 1/2':
Subject: [4] How well does JPEG compress images?
Very well indeed, when working with its intended type of image (photographs and suchlike). For full-color images, the uncompressed data is normally 24 bits/pixel. The best known lossless compression methods can compress such data about 2:1 on average. JPEG can typically achieve 10:1 to 20:1 compression without visible loss, bringing the effective storage requirement down to 1 to 2 bits/pixel. 30:1 to 50:1 compression is possible with small to moderate defects, while for very-low-quality purposes such as previews or archive indexes, 100:1 compression is quite feasible. An image compressed 100:1 with JPEG takes up the same space as a full-color one-tenth-scale thumbnail image, yet it retains much more detail than such a thumbnail.
Read more: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part1/#ixzz0UKB59gND
Message was edited by: Old Toad

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