Artifacting in non-original size pictures

marlinspike · February 13, 2005

Is there anything smugmug or I could be doing to avoid artifacting in my pictures when viewed at large size? (like around this guy's right foot http://Davidson.smugmug.com/photos/15790619-L.jpg)? I upload one set of photos to a gallery that are right click protected and watermarked for sale and printing, and that same set to another private, passworded gallery that I send to the paper editors so they can take what photos they want. When they print from the original sized photos, they get seriously artifacty (methinks their software sucks), but if they used the large size photos the artifacts would be built in, and I dont want to have to resize all my photos before uploading to the editors' gallery.
Richard

Andy · February 13, 2005

are the editors printing from your orig photos? if so, any artifacts are result of your process, not smugmug's. regarding -L, there's not much you can do except go light on any sharpening or your images prior to upload. smug applies a basic amount of sharpening. alternative would be to make your own 800px max images, sharpen to taste, and allow origs to be seen.

marlinspike wrote:

Is there anything smugmug or I could be doing to avoid artifacting in my pictures when viewed at large size? (like around this guy's right foot http://Davidson.smugmug.com/photos/15790619-L.jpg)? I upload one set of photos to a gallery that are right click protected and watermarked for sale and printing, and that same set to another private, passworded gallery that I send to the paper editors so they can take what photos they want. When they print from the original sized photos, they get seriously artifacty (methinks their software sucks), but if they used the large size photos the artifacts would be built in, and I dont want to have to resize all my photos before uploading to the editors' gallery.
Richard

marlinspike · February 13, 2005

Right, my editors are printing from my originals and the artifacting results from their poor downsizing, so I was thinking I could tell them to just save the larges to disk instead, but then I noticed that the larges have their own flavor of artifacting. I suppose for newspaper printing though, the smugmug kind of artifacting is good enough though, and it's certainly better than the artifacting they've been doing.
Richard

pmaland · February 14, 2005

Artifacts
In the past I've written to complain about what I thought was simply oversharpening of the resized images, but yesterday I uploaded one and noticed a really bad JPEG artifact on the picture border (bottom left corner):

http://maland.smugmug.com/photos/15850211-M.jpg

I then resized my original to 600x409 and tried to get it's size down to 23k as this one is on smugmug. I had to change to quality level down to 3 to get it that small. Is that right? Is smugmug using that much JPEG compression on all resized pictures?

- Phil

onethumb · February 14, 2005

pmaland wrote:

In the past I've written to complain about what I thought was simply oversharpening of the resized images, but yesterday I uploaded one and noticed a really bad JPEG artifact on the picture border (bottom left corner):

http://maland.smugmug.com/photos/15850211-M.jpg

I then resized my original to 600x409 and tried to get it's size down to 23k as this one is on smugmug. I had to change to quality level down to 3 to get it that small. Is that right? Is smugmug using that much JPEG compression on all resized pictures?

- Phil

Not exactly. I assume you're referring to Photoshop when you say "quality level down to 3" and that you're doing "Save As" and not "Save For Web" ? (Photoshop contains at least two different ways to save JPEGs, one of which uses a 1-12 scale and one uses 0-100)

One thing you're missing is that we strip out the ICC profiles (4-5K typically, sometimes as high as 8K) and EXIF data (variable, sometimes nothing, sometines a few KB) of the Medium size, so to compare apples to apples, take that into account. It's probably very close to Photoshop's "Save As" 6 setting, if I had to guess.

(BTW, I'm looking at that image on a pair of calibrated monitors, one LCD and one CRT, and they both look gorgeous. I don't see any visible artifacts, but everyone's eyes and monitors are different).

We have to compress our images this much because otherwise we hear a huge number of complaints from people browsing the site. Every couple of KB adds an extra second to the page's load time for anyone browsing on a modem. They come at us with torches and pitchforks if we don't keep it fast.

Here's a recent thread about it

And here's some more about artifacts

Don

marlinspike · February 14, 2005

Granted with the amount and rate at which you guys come up with improvements I don't know where you find the time to breath, but I'd be interested in a high quality large option. Granted my case is probably limited to me only, but you know, there might be others in my situation.
Richard

fish · February 14, 2005

pmaland wrote:

In the past I've written to complain about what I thought was simply oversharpening of the resized images, but yesterday I uploaded one and noticed a really bad JPEG artifact on the picture border (bottom left corner):

http://maland.smugmug.com/photos/15850211-M.jpg

I then resized my original to 600x409 and tried to get it's size down to 23k as this one is on smugmug. I had to change to quality level down to 3 to get it that small. Is that right? Is smugmug using that much JPEG compression on all resized pictures?

- Phil

Phil,

I opened the O version of that image and it appears that the artifacts are there too, so perhaps it's either your camera or the way you saved the image?

Here's a 100% crop of the area in question:

Artifacting in non-original size pictures

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