Gallery Image Quality

I have noticed recently that my gallery photos look rather soft. I haven't noticed this before. I have also had a look at galleries from a couple of other members whose photos I know to be razor sharp, they look soft too.

I have just uploaded this portrait. It looks rubbish at all sizes and especially the click though size which I uploaded at 900 pixels height. The version on my machine is perfectly sharp. The click through version on flickr (800 height on black) looks as it should although other flickr resized versions do look soft (the original is fine).

I've examined some older pictures which I know are sharp and which I'm sure looked sharp in the gallery previously. They looked soft too.

Has anything changed or am I dreaming? If so, how can I get my pictures looking sharp in the gallery? What sizes should I upload?

I dont often click through on the recently added gallery pics because there sadle is very little that catches my attention. Your picture of Lea was one of the exceptions and I have to ssay it doesn't look soft to me not having seen the original.

I tend to upload at the size the pictures will be shown at although that has annoyed some people because there isnt a bigger version.

I thought your picture was taken in low light but her pupils suggest otherwise?

Thanks Ken, I haven't got a studio so it's a natural light portrait taken on the step of my barn to give a dark background. For a side by side comparison, here is the image uploaded to this site:




I've uploaded the exact same to 500 pix here

And here is the flickr 'lightbox' version.

I am now convinced that the version here looks soft in comparison. The 500pix version is very faithful to what is on my hard drive. I hadn't noticed this softness in the gallery before, I'm sure I would have as I am rather picky about image quality.

Picture looks fine to me, Doc, It's a wonderful portrait with lovely skin tones and lots of fine detail in her curls.

Pity Ken finds little to please him in the Gallery, with photographers like Shaun (puma) and Tim (timbo) inter-alia, as regular contributors, his standards must be highly exacting

I'm really struggling to see much difference between them to be honest.

The only one that appears significantly different to me is the initial display of the Flickr one, which initially appears enlarged (by the site) and a bit on the soft side. Clicking on it changes the display to a smaller version, which is then just as sharp as the others.

The 900px version in your original link looks very slightly less sharp than the 800px version in your later post, but that's not in itself surprising - smaller pictures often look sharper.

Certainly wouldn't say any of them look rubbish.

I just see the recently uploaded ones on the home page when I log in.

I'm far too busy to plough through hundreds of tired, hackneyed and cliched pictures in the vain hope of finding some nugget of originality and expression which I'm sure must exist

Anyway this contributes nothing to the op

Shaun and Timbo are fine. Unfortunately one has to wade through an awful lot of dung to find the few lillies.

Some people seem to think that because they have taken a picture of a beautiful subject, the picture itself must therefore be good. Not so.

This is especially true, it seems, of pictures of the Lake District. One member floods the gallery with third-rate pictures of lakes and mountains as though he were doing us all a favour. God knows why.

G

I'm more interested in how to display my pictures to the standards I would like. I find more detail and sharpness in the 500pix upload. If the above portrait were to look on my drive as it does on this thread I would delete it. If I click on it though it takes me to an acceptable version.

Maybe a separate thread would be better to discuss the overall quality of gallery images.

I would appreciate if a forum techie person could tell me what dimensions I should be uploading, to the gallery and to threads, in order to maximise display quality. How do I avoid the forum software resizing my images?

I agree with Dr. O that the images on the Gallery are soft, there must be something going on within the upload process that is compressing them, even when the originals are in a suitable size and format. I find this less so on the click through version, but it is still an issue.

With regard to the photographic quality (or otherwise) of Gallery images uploaded, it is not relevant to this thread and is completely off topic. However, I feel that if members are going to comment on this, they should be prepared to upload some of their own images so we can all judge their comparative quality and creativity. We must bear in mind that a large number of contributors to the Gallery are enthusiastic amateurs, not professional photographers, myself included, and we just enjoy sharing the pictures we take. I don't have any issue with members not viewing the Gallery, but I do not think it's fair that sometimes scathing comments are made by some members who rarely (if ever) contribute to the Gallery in terms of posting pictures.

Back to the topic of the thread, it does seem that somethig could be done to improve the quality of images uploaded (in technical terms relating to the upload process) so that we can all enjoy them in their best possible quality.

Regards
David

Thanks David, I was starting to think I must have been dreaming this.

A Pentax gallery is the best advertisement for Pentax gear so I do think it's worth considering maximising display quality.

This imagewas taken with the 77. The original has wonderful sharpness, detail and texture, as one would expect from that lens. However, in the gallery it looks like it could have been taken with a cheap compact.

I noticed a similar thing, but only in that the resized (600px) version was slightly softer than the version you see when you click through. The larger size version should be exactly as the image you upload looks, unless you exceed the maximum image size, for example uploading the original full-sized shot, which causes the forum software to kick in and make a real mess of your image.

(I can't see much wrong with your images, Dr.O).

I do feel you are maybe being more critical of your own images Dr. O, because you're used to seeing them in all their native glory on your PC, whilst members viewing them on here are comparing them like for like with other images uploaded via the same process that also suffer. For what it's worth, despite the compression / softening, your images still stand out from the rest because they are so good in the first place. I do agree though that it would be great if the IQ on the Galllery could be improved. A short while ago I uploaded an image of a bird of prey which is absolutely razor-sharp, but on the Gallery looked quite soft and lost a lot of its impact.

Regards
David

I've looked at your pics on a fairly low res monitor a Samsung NC10 netbook. When you find a cheap compact that can produce images such as you are showing please point me to the shop so I can buy one too

Some people are not seeing differences in sharpness between the gallery and others are.

I wonder if there's something about the way people's browsers behave that shows some images other than at their intended zoom level.

For instance, some web sites enlarge images to fit the tab as the browser window changes size. It's also possible (using Ctrl-mouse wheel for instance, in Firefox), to change the displayed text size of web pages, and their contained images.

Is it possible that some people are genuinely seeing something different than others?

I've looked at the images in question, and I really can't see much to distinguish them. And I'm pretty sure I can tell when an image doesn't look sharp

Was it this one?

It looks pretty sharp to me in the gallery .... if the original is even sharper, could you put the original online somewhere so that I could actually download the file and look at it outside a browser?