Image Degradation - Am I Missing Something?

Talk about Pixelmator Pro, share tips & tricks, tutorials, and other resources.
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2020-05-09 22:17:33

I'm not sure if this is in the right place but am hoping someone can help. I'm using Pixelmator Pro to edit RAW photos with the intent editing and then exporting them for onto my Etsy shop. The reason I purchased the software is because I read Pixelmator worked more like Lightroom when it came to preserving image quality. Anyway, I'll start out with 19 mb file and by the time I'm done editing - brightening, cropping, removing the background, replacing with a color fill mainly, I export it and it's down to 2 mb and not nearly as crisp as when I started. I tried exporting at 2 or 3x but it's not even loading.

Is this just the nature of the processing and if so, are they any recommendations for how to mitigate?
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2020-05-11 13:50:13

Hi Laura! Generally speaking, when exporting images, all apps are able to preserve as much image quality as the formats they work with allow. So, for example, if you export a JPEG at 75% quality, most images will look a little more compressed once exported than they do in an app. However, our adjustments certainly preserve quality better than most apps during the editing process, especially when editing RAW. So, once you're done editing, if the image looks good in the app, the trouble is probably with your export settings. If the images look good in the app, look good after exporting, and then lose quality once uploaded online, the trouble is usually with the website compressing the images once again to make sure they load quickly. The third one is kind of unavoidable for the most part.

So, my questions for you are:

1. Do the images appear to lose quality during editing? If so, are there any edits in particular that seem to cause this?
2. Do the images appear to lose quality after exporting? If so, what formats are you exporting to, and what export settings are you using?
3. Do the images appear to lose quality after uploading to Etsy? If so, do you happen to know what their size/format requirements are for the kinds of images you're uploading?