Quality of photos looking poor
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I had been uploading numerous photos via a page on wordpress and should have been doing it via a post. On advice from the forum I have now done so with a post which I split into various pages. For the first time I have now noticed that some of the images look terrible and don’t resemble to original photo at all. I particular this image:
http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/7/#wpcom-carousel-6540
not sure if I have shared the link properly as I’m new to all this. Could anyone advise please?I use photoshop. The images are 18 x 12 inches at a resolution and I use the ‘save for web’ function, This problem has only started after choosing the post and not page option.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Announcement re: photo carousel here > http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/new-photo-carousel/
Are you optimizing and presizing all image to fit the maximum displayed image width of your theme, prior to uploading them? If the copper is brought into play then image quality is lost.Do these troubleshooting tips help?
images troubleshooting
troubleshooting images -
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The URL you gave is not correct. Are you talking about this page?
http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/7/Which one of the images? And when viewing what, the thumbnail, the carousel or the attachment page?
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Hi there, sorry I uploaded the images again and without doing anything different they looked a bitter better. I have read the articlrs and for my theme the pixel width should be 640. This left me a bit confused as to what the height should be, or does that not matter? My images have been quite a bit larger than the recommended size, so maybe it’s that. Will try again later on and once again thankyou for all this advice.
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http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/#wpcom-carousel-6431
as an e.g from Vichy 19/07/11, course 1, image 7, the image quality liikds dreadful and does not look like that on the original image. I certainly wouldn’t want to buy that! -
a) For an individual image on a post or a page, width matters but height doesn’t (because most themes have a fixed-width main column but no theme has a restriction on height: you just scroll down). For the gallery carousel height matters, because the images get scaled down to fit in the viewer’s screen both horizontally and vertically.
b) I understand you’re referring to this image:
http://syoungphotography.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/mg_0626.gif
But you didn’t answer part of my question: when you say “dreadful quality” are you talking about the thumbnail on the post, the version you get when viewing the carousel slideshow, or the version on the attachment page (the page you get when clicking “Permalink”)?c) The info in my post on maximum image width is irrelevant, as it refers to images inserted individually in a post or a page, not to attachment pages, not to carousel images. In many themes attachment pages have a larger width (900px in the theme you’re using), and the displayed size in the carousel depends on the viewer’s screen resolution. What’s yours?
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Hi there, sorry it wasn’t that image, it’s this one,http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/_mg_0624/
it’s the image I see on the carousel view. When I was looking at the downloaded images, it was as though the jockeys faces were really unclear and the dark horses almost had a transparent quality. So from what you have said I think my image sizes are ok. However they are slightly larger than the 900px. The original image size I have for all images is 18″ x 12″ at 300dpi. When I resize them I only change the dpi (resolution) to 72 and save as for web devices. My pixels are then 1296 width x 864.
If I needed to resize them when reducing them in the future, it would be a lot of work, so hopefully I won’t need to . Will try and load on another course later today. My screen is set to it’s highest res. Will need to check what that is. Cheers again. -
That image looks bad when I view the attachment page but ok in the carousel (my screen resolution is 1680×1050). But it’s 1440px wide, not 1296.
The general issue is that images downsized by WP lose some color and sharpness – see here:
http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/image-quality/There can be no precise answer as far as the carousel is concerned, because it doesn’t display images at a fixed pixel width: it changes to adapt to each user’s screen. But since most users’ screens are no wider than 1000-1200px, and since your attachment pages are 900px wide, my advice is save copies of your images as JPGs, not GIFs, scale them down to resolution 72dpi and width 900px, and upload those copies.
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Hi there, i am reducing all the images first. I think with the theme I have they should be 640 pixels wide. However I couldn’t figure out how to ‘delete the width and height commands from the image code (in the html editor)’. Will keep looking. Cheers again
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Check this reply again, paragraph c:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/quality-of-photos-looking-poor?replies=10#post-755795
640px is the width of your post column: it’s the maximum you should observe if you inserted individual images. Since you’re inserting galleries, neither the 640 nor my instructions on deleting the dimensions from the code are of concern to you. Gallery attachment pages don’t display the sidebar, so the maximum is larger. Example:
http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/_mg_0619/
That’s 900px wide. -
Ah got you, ok. The eg. that you referred to above is a good eg of what is displaying as a really bad photo. If you look at the stomach of the horses they look really grainy and almost transparent and I don’t know why.
http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/_mg_0619/ -
As I’ve already explained, images downsized by WP lose quality. Compare WP scaling down and Photoshop scaling down:
http://sharonyoungphotography.com/2011/11/27/vichy-190711/_mg_0619/
http://wpbtips.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mg_0619downsized.gif
I think you’ll notice that the first is a bit duller.But the difference is small. The real problem is your originals:
http://syoungphotography.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/mg_0619.gif
Your photos should be JPGs, not GIFs. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG
“The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color”.
“The JPEG compression algorithm is at its best on photographs and paintings of realistic scenes with smooth variations of tone and color.” -
Hi there, cheers for that/will look into it but something is a bit odd as my files are saved in Photoshop as JPG not GIF.
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sorry I take that back, they are GIF!!!!!!!
I can see what’s happened, when in photoshop I usually click the ‘save as for web and devices’ and somehow it changed to the GIF format. So I did it again with JPG selected and it was just a bit better. So, I might stop saving for web and devices and do it normally. What a carry on. -
When you select Save for Web in Photoshop, again you can select the filetype. You just hadn’t noticed that GIF was preset: you can change that to JPG (and adjust the quality as well).
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