This has been puzzling me for ages. I spend ages on a sig then suddenly it looks terrible. ANY help will be greatly appreciated. Here is an example: thanks Edit: thanks i can now rest easy ^^
yeah when you save a jpg, there is a slider(in photoshop), sometimes ps sets it to 4 or 5 which can lead to that blurry/low quality image; move the slider up however, to 12 (max) or about 10, and you'll retain a good amount of quality in the image. i've learned theyre the way to go to help with loading times and keeping a good amount of detail. png is pretty much a lossless file, just it takes longer to load, but unless your making a webdesign, that doesn't really matter.
Unless you have dial up, pngs shouldn't be an issue. Unless you've got a monster tag, it'll hardly reach 100 kBs. Personally, I dislike compromise. No jagglies in my tags, thank you very much.
I kinda amused myself too. I think the problem here is your blurring your image. Avoid doing that, like use sharpen filters. You could also be facing a problem where when your working in photoshop or whatever similar design program that your canvas is set to a low resolution.
Also, I'm pretty sure photobucket screws .jpg's anyways. And imageshack has started doing it too lately. You upload a .jpg with no visible artifacts, but once it passes through imageshack it looks like maybe a 6 quality image.