On 2006-03-15 12:43:15 +0100, Jason
said:
Hi,
We had some photos taken for our web site, unfortunately the dimensions are way to big for the web and when the imagea are scaled down the loss of quality & clarity is very evident. Is there a technique to preserve as much as possible the quality of an image when scaling it down to a much smaller size.
Thanks, Jason.
Hi Jason,
Welcome to the wonderous land of JPEG (or so I presume). JPEG is reknowned for its artifacting habit.
When you take pictures, or even save freshly created creations in Photoshop to a heavy compressed JPEG format image, there’s bound to be ugly artifacting in the picture. That’s why it is called a lossy compression. It throws away detail to get it compressed to smaller files.
If you have, however, shot the pictures in a less compressed manner (see the manual of your camera for the settings) you have higher quality pictures with less artifacting. This will make big files for your photographs though. It’s a weighing decision, have more pictures with less quality on your cam/memory card, or less photographs but with a higher quality.
But to get to your problem at hand, those pictures you scaled down… Are they of bad quality within Photoshop already before you ever saved them ? And this is with the assumption you do use Photoshop to resize them. S-Spline Pro is even better for resizing photographs but that’s a commercial add-on on top of Photoshop, so it gets more expensive π
Mind you, when resizing within Photoshop, notice the title bar of the photographs. There’s a percentage there. Usually when you open a larger-than-your-screen-resolution image in photoshop, PS resizes it realtime to a percentage so that the whole image fits within the interface. That could have you looking at a preview resizing to say 66%. That looks VERY rough and bad. When you choose the menu View->Actual size/Pixels then it won’t fit fully into the window, but you are in fact looking at the actual pixels of the picture. When you have resized, or before resizing choose this, then you’re sure you’re looking at the real thing instead of some rough preview-quality realtime resize of PS.
Hope you have some information to go on. If it’s not enough, please reply.
With kind regards,
The PS user.