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As to your step 5, saving as jpg. JPEG is a lossy format, it 'throws away' detail to compress the file. You are losing quality right there. Better to save as TIF ,with lossless or no compression, or as PNG which uses lossless compression. Keep that as a master should future changes be needed.
Any working images should be done in TIF or PNG.
The final version used in the book can be PNG, other tools can compress without losing quality but will still probably be bigger than JPEG. JPEG could be used but some quality will be lost, other tools can control the amount of compression and thus quality.
JPEG is good for pictures, the eye will blend over artifacts from compression so not so noticeable. Line drawings and text will suffer from artifacts created during JPEG compression, better to use PNG for those if you only have an image.
Every time you make a change in a JPEG and save it you are reducing the quality as it compresses the file again.
'fraid I don't know Apple so can't suggest other tools. Oh, there is free program, GIMP, with capabilities similar to Photoshop. It is somewhat complicated but I think there is a port for the MAC.
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