Pixelation in smugmug jpgs?

Dynde87

Hi guys

I'm new to Lightroom and new to SmugMug, so I'm hoping someone can help me out (and that I'm in the right forum for this question, I was on the fence whether to put it in support, but then idk if it's actually a problem with SmugMug or just me)

I have this set of photos I took of a sunset, shot in jpg, edited in Lightroom to my liking and then published via the plugin to smugmug. My problem now is that the quality of the deep blacks on smugmug are horribly pixelated - something that is not evident in Lightroom, or if I export to jpg and open in any other viewer.

I made a public smart gallery for your viewing here:
http://www.bytewalker.dk/Category/Public

As you can see, pretty much all of the sizes generated by SmugMug has ugly pixelation. I realize some of my adjustments in Lightroom are a bit much and very dark, but I liked it and like I said it's not even a little pixelated at any size in lightroom or exported to jpg.

Can anyone shed some light on what I could do to make it look better on smugmug?

Like I said, I'm also new at lightroom, so if there's any adjustments I could make to get more consistently 'black' blacks, or smoother transitions into those 'clipped' blacks I'm all ears.

Thanks

pathfinder

Welcome to dgrin.

Jpgs have limited ability to tolerate image editing steps, and Lightroom can quite powerfully modify images, even jpgs, and not always in a good way. You did not describe your image editing steps in detail, so I can only speculate about what you did.

The images I see at your link have uncorrected chromatic aberration, and noisy skies, but the blacks do not look "horribly pixelated" to my eyes when I look at your images in their original file sizes. They do look under exposed, but I assume that is the look you are going for, as you mentioned. Your images are tagged sRGB as they should be for Smugmug display, and when I download your file and examine it in Photoshop on a calibrated monitor, it matches what I see on your Smugmug gallery nicely.

To get blacker blacks in Lightroom, move your black slider to the left, this effectively raises the value of your black point, rendering all tones darker than your black point as absolute black. Absolute black will have no pixelation, as it reads 0,0,0 which is the total absence of all light in an image file.

If the noise in the dark tones needs correction, you can use the Noise reduction software in Lightroom, or a plug in like NoiseWare which is quite good.

Dynde87

Thank you very much for your efforts, I found out it was a browser problem. Something about windows 8 and firefox color management. I turned it off, restarted, turned it on again, and all pixelation went away!

And yeah, I realize the preset I used and my minor additional adjustments made some noise in the sky, but after a bit of noise reduction it smoothed out a bit, and I can live with that (the black pixelation was HORRIBLE).

Thanks!

pathfinder

I live in OS 10.7.5 and used Safari 6.0.2 and I did not see the pixelation, so a browser issue could b e a real possibility. Thank you for returning and describing the cure of your issue.

Sam

I was about to comment as well that I see no pixilation. I am using a Mac with Snow Leopard, and Fire Fox.

Sam