Custom Sizes Image Quality Issue

bigremember

Hi,

I've been using a lot of Custom Sizes in projects recently and I've been noticing that the Custom Sizes are often suffering from blurriness and bad compression... I figured I maybe had my maximum gallery size clamped down and they were generated from a smaller size, but after re-checking my settings that wasn't the case.


I noticed it was particularly bad on a high-contrast graphic design I had uploaded for portfolio use and since I had an 1800px x 1800px version on hand I uploaded it as a test: (It's Op-Art so if you have epilepsy you might not want to look)

SmugMug Medium (450px by 450px):
http://bigremember.smugmug.com/photos/293805132_mPZau-M.jpg

Custom Size (450px by 450px):
http://bigremember.smugmug.com/photos/293805132_mPZau-450x450.jpg

The difference between the two is quite large.



I would really love if the Custom Sizes were as sharp as the regularly generated sizes, it's really a tremendous feature that I have a lot of use for... but if the image quality isn't good enough then I'll sort of be forced to do hard size edits in photoshop (something I'd love to avoid).



Another example (from an 800px by 533px original)

SmugMug Medium (600px by 400px):
http://www.bigremember.com/photos/196538648_kDZva-M.jpg

Custom Size (600px by 400px):
http://www.bigremember.com/photos/196538648_kDZva-600x400.jpg

Besides the compression there's a noticeable shift in the colors (both the blue and the red become darker and cooler)


I can provide more examples if it would help zero in on the issue.


Thanks for making SmugMug such a great product/platform.

rainforest1155

Hi,

Thanks for bringing that up. I've looked into this and it seems that the custom sizes use a lower jpg quality setting. I'll do some further testing later on and pass it on to our engineers.

Thanks for your patience.

Sebastian

bigremember

rainforest1155 wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for bringing that up. I've looked into this and it seems that the custom sizes use a lower jpg quality setting. I'll do some further testing later on and pass it on to our engineers.

Thanks for your patience.

Sebastian

Thanks for looking into it, I think something must have changed in the algorithm because I remember when first using Custom Sizes that the images looked good and didn't have any noticeable compression artifacts so perhaps this issue developed sometime in the last handful of months.<br/><br/>