Paint Shp Pro 7 doing odd things to photo when saved

[shalebing]

I have been using Paint Shop Pro v7 for many years - I appreciate it is an old program and although I use Photoshop for major post-processing tasks, I find PPS7 very handy for quick, simple jobs like cropping, sharpening, colour balance etc. The program has never given me any problems whatsoever in the years I have been using it but just today it has started dong something weird. I opened up an image file that had already been saved as I wanted to adjust the colour balance but when I re-saved it, the newly saved version is a terrible, pixelated mess. My first reaction was that the JPG compression had somehow become too high and it was saving at the lowest quality but this setting was fine - I have never had reason to change to it anyway. I haven't changed any of the other settings either but I don't really know what to look for at this point.

I have attached a before and after version of the photo and if anyone knows what may be causing this I would appreciate any feedback.

[LindaSue]

I looked at your photo in PSP7 and got exactly the same results when I saved a JPG at full compression of 99. It would seem that you accidentally changed the compression level.

[shalebing]

LindaSue - thanks for the reply. I don't know what happened there - when I first checked the compression status after the initial problem showed up, it was set to 0% compression (best quality). I tried re-saving another pic and got the same problem again but when I checked the compression setting it had moved to 99%. I have now set it to 0% and it now seems to be staying at that as I have tested it a few times with OK results.

Apologies for that.