Pictures slightly out of focus
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I am using Twenty Twelve, but the problem I want to describe isn’t restricted to that theme. I have noticed that photos are softened — thrown just ever so slightly out of focus. This drives me nuts. I want them sharp. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I size them precisely before uploading them to WordPress or if I let WordPress handle it. This doesn’t happen anywhere else. The photos are perfectly sharp in Facebook, for instance.
Does anyone know the reason for this? Is it because I am using a responsive theme — that is, could it have something to do with the need to be able to resize pictures on the fly? Can anyone explain either (1) how to eliminate the softening effect or (2) what I should look for in a theme so that it doesn’t happen?
Thank you.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hey, Dan. To start off, could you tell us the dimensions of the pictures in pixels? I looked at a few on your site, and the ones I saw looked fine. But then I don’t have a point of reference.
Could you show us an example? If you can give us the URL of one of the pics on your site and the same pic on Facebook, maybe we can see the difference.
Cheers,
-Brian -
Brian — Thank you for checking in. Let me give you a couple of examples. First, here is a picture I took that was published at the Nieman Journalism Lab. It’s hardly my best work, as it’s already slightly out of focus. But here is the same picture on my blog. You can obviously see that it looks even more out of focus. It is 625 pixels horizontally as published on my blog. The version I sent to Nieman was 3264 pixels across. I know what you’re going to say, so I’ll answer it: (1) I find the softening effect takes place no matter what the original size is; and (2) I’m sure my editor at Nieman shrunk the photo considerably before posting so that it would load faster.
Another example. Here is a nice sharp photo. I copied the photo. I guarantee you that if I opened it up in Preview, it would look just as sharp. But here it is on my blog. Soft, bordering on blurry.
Finally, you asked for a Facebook example. Here is an Instragram photo I took that I also posted on Facebook. It looked just as sharp in both places. And here it is on my blog — it’s subtle, but you can again see a softening.
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Also, Brian — I’m told that WordPress uses automatic JPEG compression, and that there’s a plug-in to turn it off if you’re using WordPress.org. Is there any way of turning it off for us WordPress.com users?
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Dan, sorry to leave you hanging. I don’t know if this will help, but I found this blog post:
http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/image-quality/Although I think his idea may only work with fixed width themes.
There are also a lot of potentially helpful suggestions in this forum thread:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/blurry-images-7?replies=2Cheers,
-Brian -
Thanks, Brian. I have since learned that the problem goes away if I save it as a PNG file, since those fly under the radar of WordPress’ automatic compression. So maybe that’s the best solution for now. It did seem to make a pretty big difference.
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