Classifieds Picture Quality

[rypt]

Ok, someone tell me ... what am I missing?

When I upload a picture of the car it comes out as pretty crap quality, despite looking just fine on my computer before upload.
I used Picasa to shrink the image down to 480x360, and it comes out just as bad as when I use 600x size

For example here is the picture uploaded straight from my pc


And this is how it comes out on PH ...

[Mr Will]

The classifieds system resizes the images to 800 pixels wide after they are uploaded, so if you are uploading pictures smaller than this then it will stretch them, which is always bad for quality.

[rypt]

I've re-upped them as 800s now, still looks crappier than the original


vs

Edited by rypt on Tuesday 6th July 14:26

[rypt]

Is it me, or is there a difference even between these 2 pics? 1 is a direct upload to tinypic, the other is an "unmodified" upload via Picasa

Edited by rypt on Tuesday 6th July 14:27

[Mr MoJo]

Its you, they are the same.

If I were you I'd concentrate on getting the whole car in the picture before worring about the quality !!

[rypt]

Mr MoJo said:

Its you, they are the same.

If I were you I'd concentrate on getting the whole car in the picture before worring about the quality !!

That's just one of the shots, there are pictures of the whole car as well


And they don't look the same to me, the top pic looks more blurry above the rear wheel arch, with more colour/reflection distortion

Edited by rypt on Tuesday 6th July 17:17

[rypt]

Think I've worked out what's up

PH changes my images to 96dpi, while the original (and Picasa resizes) are 72dpi

[AcidReflux]

rypt said:

Think I've worked out what's up

PH changes my images to 96dpi, while the original (and Picasa resizes) are 72dpi

That shouldn't make any difference, since you're not printing the photos.

I created an advert a few days ago and resized all my photos to 800 wide. After upload they're significantly smaller than that. But the quality was acceptable.

[rypt]

AcidReflux said:

That shouldn't make any difference, since you're not printing the photos.

I think it's the process of changing the images that's causing the issue, going to try re-uploading them as 96 dpi stuff once PH advert management stops breaking

EDIT: Well that's done bugger all, still looks crap. I'm at a loss why, as it looks just fine pre-upload.

More fiddling to do

Edited by rypt on Tuesday 6th July 20:53

[AcidReflux]

What I'm seeing in the PistonHeads versions of the images is JPEG compression artifacts. Bright red is always a difficult colour to compress efficiently in JPG images so the problem may simply be the colour of your car. The PH team could reduce the compression level on all classified adverts throughout the site to improve things. Try emailing Mr Will.

[Mr Will]

AcidReflux said:

What I'm seeing in the PistonHeads versions of the images is JPEG compression artifacts. Bright red is always a difficult colour to compress efficiently in JPG images so the problem may simply be the colour of your car. The PH team could reduce the compression level on all classified adverts throughout the site to improve things. Try emailing Mr Will.

Correct, and every time you convert an image (or even re-save it) they get worse.

The compression level in the classifieds is chosen to balance disk space usage with quality and (although it isn't perfect) it is generally fine for it's intended use.

[AcidReflux]

Mr Will said:

The compression level in the classifieds is chosen to balance disk space usage with quality and (although it isn't perfect) it is generally fine for it's intended use.

I thought that's what you might say