How do you prepare a Photo for the Forum?

None of the pictures I have posted have been any near the quality I see them on my screen. Loss of sharpness, aliasing etc.. Obviously there is going to be some loss of IQ in reducing a photo to 800 pixels wide, but others seem to be able to cause less degradation to their pictures.

I have tried using Pentax Photolab and raw therapy to create an 800 pixel jpg from raw, and resizing the jpg using Paintshop pro (ancient version).

My photos are hosted on Photobucket - don't know if it makes a difference.

My photos are hosted on Photobucket as well. I resize in Photoshop, applying sharpening as the last step in the process. As an alternative you can also resize in Photobucket.

I suspect it's the processing that is causing the problem - it would be very helpful for you I think if you started to use Photoshop Elements.

Other things to check are that you are using sRGB colour space, essential for the web, and that your file size is not too small. Ideally 800 pixels wide and a file size of about 200 - 400K should suffice. Anything larger will be wasted and will take too long to load.

The couple I've posted to the forum rather than uploading to the gallery have just been links to photos hosted on flickr, I've just been grabbing the URL for the "Medium" sized JPEG, it's probably not the most sophisticated of resizing methods but it seems to do a good enough job for most purposes.

I resize in photoshop or lightroom. There is a specific setting in photoshop resize for reduction ( : bicubic sharper? ) I then post the flickr link to the original file. I'd rather not leave a website to resize images for me without any control

Cheers, Kris.

The standard resampling in Photoshop is Bicubic, which is fine, but from CS2 onwards there ia a further choice.

Bicubic Smoother is used for upsizing and Bicubic Sharper is used for downsizing, such as preparing an image for Web use. This will help retain sharpness and detail.

Thanks for the replies.

PSE is on my shopping list, but having just bought three DA*s () I'm going to have to hang on for a while. I have made a case for having it at work as I do a bit of technical authoring but it hasn't turned up yet.

Is increasing the sharpness likely to make the aliasing worse?

I resize my photos in CS2 then post them on flickr. Next I go to all sizes and copy the link to the largest size which I put in my post to the Your Photos Forum.
For the Gallery I resize the photo the same way and save it to a folder on my PC then upload from my PC to the Gallery.

If you sharpen too much you will get artifacts and the image will look dreadful.

Moderation in all things will give the results you need. Over-sharpening is definitely to be avoided.

I have downloaded Gimp and tried that to re-size.

1/. Using cubic

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/IMGP1629.jpg[/IMG]

2/. Using Sinc

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/IMGP1629a.jpg[/IMG]

3/. Using ancient Paintshop Pro

[IMG]http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc222/Oggy3323/Imgp1629b.jpg[/IMG]


Any thoughts appreciated.

I'm not clear what you are trying to demonstrate - bicubic resampling may well be common to all these programs.

It was as much as anything an experiment to see what the results looked like John.

To my eyes, and with my monitor, none of the images look that bad, yet I struggle to get the same results if I post in "Your photos".

I suspect others have better monitors (and eyes:shock - I was trying to get some feedback.

Here is a read and it shows difference between the resize options link

I think you meant to say "in the Gallery" - the difference may be that the Gallery resizes our images, so perhaps a slightly larger file would be beneficial.

In the Gallery I usually use the same files that I use for my e2 membership of ePHOTOzine. These are 1000 pixels wide on the longest side and a file size of at least 200K and definitely not more than 400K. A typical file size would be 220 - 300K or so.

Why not have a glance at my Gallery pictures and see if they look OK to you - if so, try the spec I've just given.

Sorry John, no. I meant "Your Photos", one up from the bottom of the forum.

Well that's exactly the same as posting here.

Dan