Posting Photos

[Richard Kennedy]

Firstly apologies if I have placed this in the wrong thread

I have posted a photo of my latest piece "copse" in the member gallery I originally used a photo 600 x 400 pixel file however Steve asked me to post a bigger file so I have tried to do this. There is now a file of 1200x 800 pixels posted however when viewed at full resolution the detail is very blurry the file is 450kb which should give a crisp picture indeed when I viewed the image in Photoshop its fine but not here on the site.

Can anyone help me understand why this has happened and what I need to do to fix the problem

Thanks in advance

Richard

 

[Joe Greiner]

The picture looks fine to me, Richard. The wood itself, that is, clicked for the larger view. The shadows are the only things that look blurry. I think the shadows should look blurry, to emphasize the piece.

Other than that, you might try massaging your monitor's resolution, or the Photoshop settings, which isn't the same environment (I think).

 

[Griesbach]

Richard, the photo look just fine to me also. And, the piece is indeed spectacular.

 

[Ed Davidson]

Richard,

Resizing a photo doesn’t necessarily add anything to the quality. There are two things to consider when preparing digital photos for publishing - size and resolution. The photo you posted is 1200 x 800 pixels at 72 dpi (dots per inch), which would translate into a 16.67†x 11.11†photo if printed out on a piece of paper. If the resolution were changed from 72dpi to 300dpi, then you’d end up with a much higher resolution, but smaller photo, measuring 3.35†x 2.18â€.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of software applications for sale on the market (and free) that will resize, crop, add contrast, re-set resolution and a host of other things. The app I like best is called VuePrint - you can download a free trial and purchase a copy here.

Your photo, at 300dpi is posted below.

 

[Richard Kennedy]

Thanks

Thanks everyone for your input Ed I didn't realise that 300dpi would lead to a smaller image thanks for that.

 

[Bill Boehme]

Thanks everyone for your input Ed I didn't realise that 300dpi would lead to a smaller image thanks for that.

Richard, the PPI (pixels per inch) resolution is only useful for printing since it does not affect the image viewed on a monitor. When you are printing an image, it is normally best to keep the PPI above 200. For web purposes, however, the PPI can be anything and it won't make a bit of difference because the size of an image viewed on a web browser is determined by its pixel dimensions.

BTW, there is a difference between PPI and DPI (dots per inch). Dots per inch is the printer's resolution which is normally much greater than the PPI of an image sent by the computer to the printer. The printer's built-in software automatically takes care of the conversion from PPI to printer DPI and also converting RGB color to CMYK color. There is not really any point in sending an image to the printer at a greater PPI than the printer's native DPI capability.

The value 72 PPI is often assigned to images as a default value, however, that is mostly a holdover from days that are long gone when most computer monitors were low quality CRT's that used NTSC interlaced scanning. Now that most monitors are LCD's, the native resolution is usually close to 100 PPI and many high-end monitors are somewhat greater than that. Of course, that also means that images will be smaller.

EDIT:

Richard, I just took a look at your pierced turning and it is absolutely stunning. The image looks reasonably sharp, but I think that I have an answer to your question of why it appears a bit soft to you. There are two things to consider: First of all, a larger image by its very nature will not appear as sharp as a smaller image. Secondly, I suspect that you may have applied some JPG compression and saved the image using the Photoshop option of "saving for the web". While this is a great way to reduce file size for a large image, the resolution will take a bit of a hit. For a 1200 X 800 image, a file size of 400 kB is somewhat small if keeping high resolution is your goal. I do not remember the file size limit for AAW members, but if you are a member, I would suggest sizing the file just under that limit. Having said all that, the image seems adequately sharp for this online gallery. There are some sharpening techniques that can be applied, if you are fluent with Photoshop.

 

[Bill Boehme]

Richard,

I hope that you do not mind that I have posted an edit of your image. I just wanted to show that just a mild bit of sharpening can sometimes make a difference in an image. Another trick that also works well is to slightly blur the background -- it has the effect of making the subject appear sharper without actually sharpening the subject. In this case, I did both. While editing, I noticed that there is a bit of dust on your camera's sensor so you might consider having it cleaned.

 

[Richard Kennedy]

Thanks Bill

Bill thank you for all your efforts and work I appreciate your endeavour! I know my camera has some dust spots I have tried the Arctic butterfly this to remove them but haven't quite worked it out however I will have to deal with it soon as editing them out takes ages!

Thanks for explaining it all to me I think i understand the process much better now!

Richard