glider wrote in icon_tutorial 😯confused

Word bubbles and darker icons...

Okay, so I'm have a problem and a question today. I used Photoshop 7.0.

Whenever I go to save an icon with the Save For Web option, I save it as a JPEG with the maximum quality, etc, etc. But for some reason, it makes my icon darker. I try to remedy this by going over it with Dodge Tool set on "Midtones" and this tends to help, but it makes the icon look different from how I intended and it's frustrating. How can I fix this?

I combed the archives for this and for my next question: I was wondering how one goes about achieving a word bubble like in the icon I'm using for this post (this one made by tiamoto_kun)? I think it's most likely a brush.