Photos are not sharp in Smugmug

Eia

For some reason when I click on an image in my smug gallery the image appears less sharp and looses detail. I'm not sure if it is Firefox or SmugMug. Any suggestions? :dunno

Eia

Never mind.... found out that FF changes images as well as font when I want to enlarge font.

Jtring

I too have noticed sharpness changes. As best as I can tell, the browsers scale images less intelligently than SmugMug does when it creates display copies. To my eye, Chrome is worse than Firefox in this regard. I've found that for maximum sharpness, it's best to view the original display copies (the X3's, the X2's, the XL's, or whatever) in the lightbox rather than viewing images scaled using the default fill option. I raised the issue here on Dgrin back in January, but there's not really much SmugMug can do, except, perhaps make it easier to default to unscaled versions of the display copies.

jjesp

Jtring wrote: »

I too have noticed sharpness changes. As best as I can tell, the browsers scale images less intelligently than SmugMug does when it creates display copies. To my eye, Chrome is worse than Firefox in this regard. I've found that for maximum sharpness, it's best to view the original display copies (the X3's, the X2's, the XL's, or whatever) in the lightbox rather than viewing images scaled using the default fill option. I raised the issue here on Dgrin back in January, but there's not really much SmugMug can do, except, perhaps make it easier to default to unscaled versions of the display copies.

Me too. The exact same images uploaded to Wordpress are sharper, no matter upload size and view size in the different lightboxes between WP and SmugMug. A bit strange....

JMontes

Photos are not sharp in Smugmug
Hi, I haven't really bothered with looking at my photos in different sizes in Smugmug since I've had an account because I've never sold anything. I upload my photos and send off to print. Now I have people wanting to buy photos and I'm setting up a gallery. The photos only look "reasonable" when viewed at original size. Anything under that and they are just unsharp, low detailed, horrible photos. This is especially true on night photos. I have two Milky Way photos in particular. The funny thing is that when I view them in smaller sizes in Photoshop they look exactly as I would expect and they scale perfectly. I don't know what it is, but they are not appearing sharp or scaling right in Smugmug. I have looked at all the settings and I can't find anything at all.

This is the gallery, please look at the Milky Way photos.

http://www.jmontesphotography.com/Marthas-Vineyard/n-BdCmPk/i-DpGk8Nm

Set on 3XL now. I can't even give you a photo for reference unless I email it to you, only then can you see what it should look like. Could this be due to the fact that I'm on a 27" retina iMac? I can't see how as the view in photoshop is absolutely spot on perfect. I really expect Smugmug to show the same when I upload a full resolution photo. Please help!

JMontes

Let me state that in the photos on my Mac, there are thousands more visible stars and the image is just way brighter and sharp. The ones on Smugmug are really DULL.

leftquark

We take great pride in making sure your photos look their best here on SmugMug, so it would be odd if they're looking unsharp, low details, or horrible, or dull. Which browser are you using?

JMontes

leftquark wrote: »

We take great pride in making sure your photos look their best here on SmugMug, so it would be odd if they're looking unsharp, low details, or horrible, or dull. Which browser are you using?

I'm using Safari, do you think that might be the issue?

Jtring

3XL images are at most 1200px high, so even though you are sending SmugMug a full-res image, what they are sending back is a down-sampled display version. So, for example, the last image in the gallery you cite comes back at only 801 x 1200. Your monitor and browser, depending on how they are set, may then up-scale to get a larger image, but the result is still just a physically bigger 801 x 1200, not one with more information. If you want to see full-res (or something close) on the images sent back from SmugMug, you need to allow the maximum display resolution to be "Original".

leftquark

Even without Original set as the Max Display Size, our display sizes (x3L, x2L, xl, large, medium, small, etc) should all look great. I'm not seeing any degradation on your photos when I look at them with my Mac in Safari. If you can take a screenshot or post links to photos that look worse and let me know which parts of the photo to pay attention to, i can dig in further.

dem

I also see softness when viewing my X3 galleries on a Retina display.

My MacBook Pro Retina display is 2880 pixels wide but SmugMug is sending landscape X3 photos at 1600 pixels wide. My Safari window is typically somewhere between those two widths so Safari has to upscale the image to fill its width. The result is softness.

leftquark

dem wrote: »

My MacBook Pro Retina display is 2880 pixels wide but SmugMug is sending landscape X3 photos at 1600 pixels wide. My Safari window is typically somewhere between those two widths so Safari has to upscale the image to fill its width. The result is softness.

Ahh, yes, any time you're trying to view photos larger than the largest size, they'll display some artifacts of upscaling. We are hard at work offering sizes that will look great on the new large / high resolution monitors. Stay tuned.

Allen

Why would anyone want their photos upscaled? That automatically degrades the photo. I'd prefer
just show the largest allowed.

leftquark

For display sizes, we'll display the photos up to their pixel dimensions, however, if someone opens the photo directly (direct link to the JPG), the browser will sometimes try to make it fill the screen, which is upscaling it. As you say, Allen, when displayed in galleries and in the lightbox, we never upscale the images.

Ex: a 1600px wide X3 will never be displayed larger than 1600px, unless the viewer opens the image directly and the browser upscales it on its own.

dem

I'm not using a direct link, I'm just clicking on photos in my galleries. They come up displayed as wide as my Safari window, which is wider than X3.

leftquark

dem wrote: »

I'm not using a direct link, I'm just clicking on photos in my galleries. They come up displayed as wide as my Safari window, which is wider than X3.

When I view the photos on your site I see collage landscape style images displayed in the small size (at 100% of their width). Opening the photos in lightbox displays X3's at 1600px, again no larger than their full width. In Lightbox, setting the photo to "Fill" loads the X3, at 1600px.

The only place we'll load an image at 100% window width is in the Profile Cover or Gallery Cover Image (the 1 photo at the top of the gallery). Where are you seeing the photos displaying wider than the x3?

dem

OK, I'm confused. On every gallery where I limit to X3 I see photos fill either the browser width or height in lightbox (depending on how wide I stretch the browser window), both in Safari when logged in to my account and in Chrome when logged out. Same on my wife's smaller MacBook Pro Retina in Chrome.

So I never see photos in lightbox with borders on all four sides (without deliberately selecting a different size), even when the browser window is large enough to accommodate an X3. My Retina screen is 2880 x 1800, so an X3 at 1600 x 1068 unscaled should appear rather small relative to the browser window.

Is there a setting I have wrong somewhere?

dem

On a related note I seem to recall a thread here some time ago where someone, maybe baldy, mentioned X4 and X5. Those would be nice.

leftquark

How is your screen setup in display preferences? (in the example below, the display size is set "to the right of center")
What is the zoom in the browser set to?

I'm seeing it display no larger than it should, with black space around the photo if the window size is >1600px

This is simulated on my monitor to match 2880x1800 with a pixel display ratio of 2 (retina)


And this is on of our QA members MacBook Pro Retina:


P.S: Baldy did elude to X4 and X5 sizes and we're still hard at work on this. We're pretty close, though there's a few things left to finish up.

dem

My display resolution preference is "Default for display". The browser is not zoomed.

What I see matches what your QA member's MacBook Pro Retina shows. Since that X3 is 1068 tall, it must be being scaled to fill the browser window like that, as that display is either 1800 or 1600 tall. While that particular image is not one of my sharpest, if you can access the original and bring it up in Preview next to Chrome I bet you'd see quite a difference in sharpness.

It's great to hear that X4 and X5 are coming.

Thanks for your continued pursuit of this issue.

dem

Here's what I see. The Safari window is not full screen width. The Pixelmator window shows the true image size, while the one in Safari has been enlarged by lightbox.

leftquark

If you do the same thing in Chrome, and right click on the photo and go to "Inspect", can you see what size it's loading? On the MacBookPro we tested it's loading the X3 1600x1068 and the browser is downscaling it to 1462 x 976 for display

dem

I see the same thing but the exact size I see in Chrome depends on how big my Chrome window is. If I make my Chrome window as big as possible (full screen, no tabs) I see:

<img class="sm-lightbox-image" src="https://photos.smugmug.com/Pets-1/i-JF2Nq3r/1/X3/D61_7831-X3.jpg" alt="Poppy &amp; Petunia" style="height: 900px; width: 1348px; position: absolute;">

I believe the effective display size of the 15" MacBook Pro Retina is 1440 x 900, so that's where the 900 must be derived from.

The size is coming from you in HTML rather than the browser, correct?

I'm no Retina expert, and find all this quite confusing.

leftquark

Could you take a screenshot of the photo in chrome or safari, and see what Pixelmator says the size is? I have a hunch it's not going to say 1349x900.

(P.S: I'm sorry to make you jump through all of these troubleshooting steps. Unfortunately my Retina MacBookPro is at the office and I can't do these troubleshooting steps for you )

dem

Screen shotting the image in Chrome full screen and manually cropping the black borders from the sides results in an image size of 2700 x 1800.

I mentioned I wasn't a Retina expert, but I did some Googling, so... :-)

It seems to me that when on a Retina display you should never specify an image size larger than half the actual width by half the actual height, so 800 x 534 in the case of this 3:2 ratio X3.

The gallery images in Collage Landscape meet this criterion and look great.

leftquark

dem wrote: »

It seems to me that when on a Retina display you should never specify an image size larger than half the actual width ...

Yea, it seems that taking the image size and dividing by pixel density would get the proper value to send to the browser.

gschlact

dem wrote: »

Screen shotting the image in Chrome full screen and manually cropping the black borders from the sides results in an image size of 2700 x 1800.

I mentioned I wasn't a Retina expert, but I did some Googling, so... :-)

It seems to me that when on a Retina display you should never specify an image size larger than half the actual width by half the actual height, so 800 x 534 in the case of this 3:2 ratio X3.

The gallery images in Collage Landscape meet this criterion and look great.

I have had parallel guesswork in the past with my Samsung his res tablet display. I do think your 1/2 explanation is slightly off. THe 1/2 refers to the display's physical pixels. So 2880 would only want to load and Image of up to 1440 image pixels to avoid downsampling. So the x3 at 1600 wide would down sample to fit (or use other dimension math)

Explanation-
It turns out it has to do with Display Independent Pixels....
It turns out that most display programs use density-independent pixel (DIP) to do native display at 160 image pixels per inch no matter what the dpi is of the screen.

Anyone know of a display program on the tablets or macs that will do actual native dpi 1:1 with image pixels? Chrome, safari and Gallery (android) are using the DIP method. . Not a bad thing, but option for native would be nice.

Ukfalc

I have his issue. My photos look fine in every size, except in light box when scaling to fit the screen, when many of them lose all their sharpness.

The only way I have found around it, is to set the maximum image sizes to one that is less than full screen. That gives me sharp photos, but obviously doesn't use the full screen.

http://www.alan-evans-photography.com

dem

@dem said:
On a related note I seem to recall a thread here some time ago where someone, maybe baldy, mentioned X4 and X5. Those would be nice.

I just noticed the new sizes are here! They look great! Thanks SmugMug!