Don't forget that JPEG compression has artifacts! And they're not all really obvious. The PHP JPEG compression is pretty decent, but it seems to generally:
-Lighten the image overall, by a reasonable amount (never seen this before, but it will drive graphic designers crazy, you might want to darken the image before compressing it)
-Reduce saturation, especially with images with lots of points of different color within a few pixels of each other (this is a documented feature of JPEG)
-Seriously mess with blue colors, which is common to all JPEG but really annoying in some situations with blue and black or other detailed blue parts
You might want to consider using imagepng() and outputting a PNG image instead of a JPEG if any of the above affect you, or your image is not very photo-like. Sometimes I have an algorithm compare JPEG to PNG for an image and send the smaller version to the user.
Also, when using imagepng(), you should use imageinterlace() before it 95% of the time. Interlaced JPEGs load progressively, improving in quality as the image loads, so users on slower connections see the whole image at low quality. All this happens without affecting the file size (actually, sometimes the file size is smaller!) or final quality.
Hope this helps a few people out. It's not all that obvious without lots of playing around.
-Galen
http://zinkconsulting.com/