Saving A File

Hello everyone, I am new to the forum and extremely new to image making. So that definitely makes me new to Photo Shop. I have version 6.0. I am having a problem saving images. Let me begin below...

I have created an image that I am quite proud of and I have used several effects. I used two "Filters" which were in the "Render" menu. They were "Clouds" and "Lighting Effects" respectively. The next thing I used was the "Layers" function. I used quite a few of the categories, "Drop Shadow", "Inner Glow" and a slew of others. Other than that, the image was just a background I made via the "Clouds" function and some text using various of the aforementioned effects. Everything looks superb in Photoshop under a .psd file. But when I went to save as anything else, such as a JPG, it said it couldn't save certain information. I was told I should try to "Merge Layers" and/or "Flatten Image." I tried both and that did stop Photo Shop from giving the message that it couldn't save certain information; however, either way I still received the same cruddy image. It turned the original image much darker in any other program other than inside of Photo Shop. How can I get my images to appear somewhere else in equal quality, such as on a web site?

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I wanted everyone to know exactly what the playing field is like.

Thanks,
Lee

If it's for personal use, you can save as a .bmp format. But if it's for the web, you're going to have to expect some sort of decrease in quality because JPEG and GIF compresses the image so it's more convenient to access and view on the web.