Aaron, there are a couple of different things that are coming to mind as I read your post, and you’ve already mentioned you’re new at this, so I’ll go into my (in)famous lecture. 🙂
The first thing I deduce from your question about the quality setting is that you are working on and resaving your images in JPEG format. JPEG has a lot of wonderful uses, but we here on the forum strongly encourage people to convert to a non-lossy format such as TIFF or PSD for editing purposes. JPEG is "lossy", which means that each time you open one, edit it, and save the changes, some of the image data is thrown away through file compression, regardless of the quality setting you choose. This isn’t noticeable at first, but if it’s repeated too many times, you will see a loss of quality when you print from the file again.
I assume these are images from a digital camera? My recommendation is that you get in the habit of immediately converting all of the original camera images to either PSD or TIFF and archiving the originals. There are a number of us who, as we’ve become more adept at image editing, have gone back to our original image and tried this whole editing thing over again, starting from scratch. It’s sometimes very handy to have a fresh copy, complete with all available original image data.
Once you have your images converted to either PSD or TIFF, you no longer have to be concerned about quality settings during the save process. The files are much bigger, but all data is preserved through many changes.
Now, if you do have a burning need to conserve space, JPEG is a popular option. I’d still recommend doing all editing in another format first, and then resave to JPEG and use the highest quality setting. That way you’ll maximize the quality of the image if you want to do more prints later.
Some people want to print their pictures and also e-mail copies to friends/relatives. Elements has a neat feature called Save for Web that does this extremely well. You can take the image you’ve gotten just the way you want it for printing and have the Save for Web reduce it in size so it becomes suitable for e-mails, and Save for Web automatically produces a new image file so your original is left untouched.
By the way, you were asking if there was any relation between the quality setting and the maximum size picture that could be printed. That gets into a kind of complicated area, but the answer – drastically simplified – is that there’s little relation between the quality setting and maximum image size. The lower the quality setting, the less likely you are to be pleased with a print, regardless of what size you make it.
Welcome to the Elements forum!! We’re really friendly to newcomers and don’t pick on people much at all, so we hope you come back with more questions – especially if you don’t understand some or all of what I just said!
Beth says this better than anyone, do save your best pix as .psd or tiff files. Then make copies to work and play on. Never mess with an original. Archive them, or at least the best ones. Date and name the folder they are in carefully.
Then I copy my "best" folders onto an ext HD, or you can make a DVD or CD of them.
Then you can use .jpg or whatever you want to do with copies, as you know your origs are safe and sound.
Have fun with them without worry.
Jane
