Thanks for bringing up this subject Jim. We don't always talk about chips only here and many people use digital cameras for taking casino chip pictures, casino pictures and related subjects pertinant to this BB.

As for image degradation with JPGs there are also (to confuse issues more) different compression ratios. If saved as "best" quality the image isn't compressed as much, and won't degrade as much, when opened, edited and saved. Of course if saved "best" quality, the file is larger... always some loss for some gain.

I do save many of my images, in their original form with one edit and then use the back-up copies for future editing. Never know when I'll want to go back to the first version, like when I found my monitor was dark and all my edited images where washed out looking on other peoples computers.

Might as well mention that resizing pictures will also degrade the quality. Not enough to make a huge difference for online use, but it does alter the pixels and can cause some strange effects.

That brings back your advise on the optical zoom. People should try to use this to frame the picture, as close to what they intend to have for the finished product. Cropping won't hurt anything, but resizing will make a difference.

Anyway, multiple saves, while editing, won't hurt anything, but re-opening and editing, then saving, followed by re-opening and editing and saving, will make a difference over a large number of edits.

Before anyone panics, you can open, edit and save, pretty many times, before you start to see any difference in the picture quality.

Save those originals! JPEGs don't take up much space at all. Sometimes, opening a picture once and saving it, will reduce the size to 25% of the original, if the original is an uncompressed JPG file.