So, I reopened the picture on my computer and, sure enough, if I zoomed in very close I could see those ugly green dots. At that point I started looking through some of my picture collection and found lots of others with green dots on them. It would seem that they are mostly on photographs and not so much on other types of graphics. All of the affected images are JPGs or were originally JPGs before I edited them.
I eventually worked out that PSP8 is putting the grid of green dots on photos that are saved in JPG format. I always use the lowest compression level when I save JPGs and have always used the default Chroma Subsampling setting. I assumed that the lowest compression would give the best quality results. I had no idea what Chroma Subsampling was so I left the default setting. I tried all of them them one-by-one though and they all produce the green dots; some worse than others. However, when I tried saving the same photo using PSP5, PSP7 and PSPX2, (using all default settings and the lowest compression) I got no green dots.
Was this a known issue with PSP8 and was there ever a fix or a work-around for it? It makes me sick now to think of all the thousands of pictures that I've saved with PSP8 that now have permanent green dots on them. Even though they don't show on my monitor unless I zoom in close, there's no guarantee that someone else won't see them on theirs. Luckily the green dots don't print so this problem has never affected my printed greeting cards. But, lately I've been considering doing more email and online greetings to save on postage, ink and paper but I'm having second thoughts now about how my graphics will appear on other people's screens if I have edited those graphics in PSP8. I've got a collection of thousands of pictures to use on my cards and goodness knows how many of them have been affected by this.
I don't really want to switch to X2 as my primary PSP version so for now I will save everything in PNG format. If I need to convert something to JPG, I will open it in X2 and resave it in there.
This is what the picture looked like on my husband's computer. I couldn't capture the defect using a screenshot so I had to take a photo of his screen with my camera. However, you can see what I'm talking about:
Here is a closeup of the photo on my monitor after saving it using PSP8's default JPG Chroma Subsampling and a compression of 1:
Here is a link to my online greeting card if you want to see how it's supposed to look:
Anniversary Card
I found the original sepia photo, changed it to greyscale to remove the green dots, and then did the hand-tinting all over again before saving it as a PNG file. So, there are no green dots on that one. If you'd like to see if you can see the green dots on your screen, I've also uploaded the old version:
Anniversary Card (with green dots)
Now that I know that the green dots are there, I can just barely make them out if I use the Zoom feature in Internet Explorer.
