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Thread: My pictures look awful on the forum

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    Default My pictures look awful on the forum

    Hello

    I just became a member of the forum but unfortunately my pictures look awful on this site. I have tried everything to see if I could get it to work. On face book my pictures are perfectly al-right and also on my Blogg. On this forum my pictures just get so big that they loose details in the birds and don't look. sharp at all. So what am I doing wrong. Has any one else experience this.

    with kind regards

    Patricia Nordforss

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    Hi Patricia, I just looked at a few of your recent images, but see very little wrong them and judging by the comments, neither did the bird experts.
    They might look better on Facebook or blog if they are smaller in size there. Smaller images tend to look sharper. There are several reasons why your images here look different from the ones on other sites, so you'll need to give us some more info.
    Do you create images for BPN from your masterfile, or do you use the same ones as for the blog or Facebook? At what size are you currently saving your images for BPN? Do you need to compress them much to meet the size limit (this will lead to loss of detail)? Do you use a sharpening algorithm when you're resizing and if so, which one? I tend to get very good results using the Save for Web option in Photoshop, using the bicubic sharper option, but I know some folks here customly sharpen their master images for posting online.

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    Super Moderator Daniel Cadieux's Avatar
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    Hi Patricia,

    First of all, thank you for the membership support.

    Are you resizing your images before uploading or linking? If you use a larger image than our maximum specs then the images will be resized to fit those dimensions, usually at a loss of quality. Make sure the image is no longer than 1200 pixels wide (or 1000 pixels tall) and no larger than 400kb.

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    Its a long time ago since I put in those pictures on avian and then I did it through photobucket. Now I am taking the pictures right out from my computer. I do use the largest picture size in the camera. 6000 x 4000 and I save them i 1200 so I suppose that is quite a lot of reduction. I just sharpen the pictures in photoshop after I have saved them in size 1200. But when I see my pictures in the forum they are twice as big as the picture I have saved in the computer and the details are sort of gone.
    Last edited by Patricia Nordforss; 08-15-2016 at 03:06 PM.

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    Here is a picture I just took today. Original size 5568 x 3712. Saved 1200 x 958, after that sharpened and saved and into the forum.Attachment 164389
    The difference is that now on the forum the picture is double as big as it is on my computer and definitely not as god. If you have a mail adress I can send you the picture from my computer and you can see the difference.
    Last edited by Patricia Nordforss; 08-15-2016 at 03:44 PM.

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    Name:  xxx052.jpg
Views: 321
Size:  349.4 KB

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    Super Moderator Daniel Cadieux's Avatar
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    Hmm. Both pane #5 and #6 are displaying properly at 1200 x 958 and 358kb...

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    HI Patricia, I'm not able to open the picture in pane #5, but #6 looks good to me. I'll send you a PM with my mail adress, I'm happy to take a look at the original and post a reduced size version using my settings in this thread, so you can see if it's different from your versions.

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    Attached Images Attached Images
     
    Hi Patricia, this is what I get from cropping the original image to the frame you posted here and saving for web at 1200px wide and max 400kb. Your image is considerably sharper, so I guess that you have applied sharpening after the crop too. In a next post, I'll see how I would process the image completely, this is just to show you what the standard option looks like. I do see that the image needs some serious compression to stick to the 400kb max. I had to save it at 86%, which is really a lot of compression that you will definately see in feather detail etc. Do you post at lower compression levels for the blog and facebook?

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    The pictures I put into facebook and my blogg are saved at 2048 pixel but both FB and my blogg makes the photos just a little bit smaller than what I been saving them so they look good.

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    Attached Images Attached Images
     
    Then the difference is most likely in the large compression needed to post here. At 2048 px I would have to compress the jpeg to 46%, which looks terrible.
    The best result I could get in a quick editwas with Nik Output sharpener Pro 3 plugin (you can download it for free), but it's quite similar to what I got with using the USM in photoshop. I sharpened the cropped original using the standard settings and didn't fine tune. Then I saved for web, setting the size to 1200px wide, used the Bicubic sharpener option and optimized to file size 400kb which set the compression to 81.
    If you want the reduced size image to look better, I'd suggest using the save for web function of photoshop, but set the width to 1000 or even slightly less, to limit the jpeg compression needed to stick to the file size limit.

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    Attached Images Attached Images
     
    Here's the same image with a width of 950 px, which saved at 92%. I did add a little high pass sharpening in addition to the Nik sharpening here, because the image started to look a little soft at this smaller size.
    This is the best I can get out of it, but I bet some of the pro's here have a better sharpening workflow than I do. Still I think that if this is not up to your standards, the compression needed for the 400kb is the culprit here.

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    Thank you so much for your help I shall certainly follow your advise. As I exhibit my photos once a year I send them to a photolabb and I have saved them and they are compressed 2048 pixel and most of them I order to the size of 30 x 40 cm. and they look just great. Its just sad that I cannot show them the way I save them on this site.

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    You are welcome. Do note that reducing the pixel size (e.g. from the 3000+ pixels in your original image to the 2048 pixels you send out for print) of the image is not the same as jpeg compression. The latter has a much worse effect on image quality, especially in fine details such as feathers. Also, it is not completely fair to compare a good large size print and a web image. I usually make macro images, in which fine detail is very important. I have a low-budget print of a dragonfly image hanging above my desk. That print already shows all the individual facets of the eyes of the dragonfly, which are hardly visible in the low size compressed jpeg I put on BPN.

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    Stunning photo and it looks great on the forum.

    with kind regards

    Patricia Nordforss

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    Is it possible that you have your web browser zoomed in a bit? Sometimes that can mess up the display of images.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Doug Brown View Post
    Is it possible that you have your web browser zoomed in a bit? Sometimes that can mess up the display of images.
    that's exactly my problem but if I zoom out the font gets so small I can't see it. I'm not having this problem anywhere else but I think it's because of the image sizes here. Help

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