There's always some loss in JPEG compression. If you have a choice it's always best to capture in RAW or Tiff format, but I don't have a digital so I don't really know anything about it except that with the pro digitals it's possible to choose and that most newspaper shooters are capturing in RAW mode. Once you get the image into photoshop you might want to resize it to something as close to physical film size as possible and at the maximum resolution that your original permits. In other words, if your captured image is 72 dpi by 24"x18", you could reduce it to 6"x 4.5" at 288 dpi and the physical file size would stay the same. You probably will be able to get a decent 5x7 print out of the file on your inkjet printer and the file would be more than adequate for sending to the gallery. Now, for the gallery your optimal size is nearly always 72 dpi because monitors function at either 72 or 96 dpi depending on the platform. PCs are 72 and some Macs are 96, as I understand it. So there's never any point in sending a file to the gallery any bigger than 96 at the most. But for best viewing you don't want to send a little tiny picture, like happened this cycle. So you need to size your image around 4"x6" at 96 or 72 dpi so we can all see it and comment on it. And you need to re-jpeg the file your going to submit so that it's tiny and transmits quickly through the phone lines of the internet. Your consumer digital point and shoot will do this just fine, whichever type of capture you use. For storage on your computer or on a CD, however, try to avoid jpegging anything you actually wish to keep. As I said at the beginning, jpeg is "lossy" and every time you reopen and resave a file in jpeg compression you lose some data. This is most obvious with files that were pretty small to begin with and most consumer point and shoots don't capture very large files. Large files generally run from 40 to 100 Meg in the world of pro photography. HTH and watch out for QKano. He's addicted to minimizing excess data in files so they download as fast as possible and probably doesn't like my header info.
