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Hi, I'm using a DSLR Canon 650D to take my recent photos. They appear sharp on my camera but when I upload them to my gallery, perhaps it is some resizing function, I lose the sharpness.

Is this a setting issue? I usually choose original image instead of the auto adjusted one because I noticed some blurring previously. I zoom in after taking the photos to make sure they are sharp and not just because of the tiny preview screen on the camera. The picture size setting on my camera is "L", so it should be fairly high res.

 milkboy wrote:
Hi, I'm using a DSLR Canon 650D to take my recent photos. They appear sharp on my camera but when I upload them to my gallery, perhaps it is some resizing function, I lose the sharpness.

Is this a setting issue? I usually choose original image instead of the auto adjusted one because I noticed some blurring previously. I zoom in after taking the photos to make sure they are sharp and not just because of the tiny preview screen on the camera. The picture size setting on my camera is "L", so it should be fairly high res.

We host nearly 600,000 images for free, but the price for that is that we have to use some image compression. We just couldn't manage otherwise. So yeah, you will notice some loss of sharpness because of this.

Sadly it is a trade-off we have no other choice but to make.

I see. Thanks for the answer. I thought it was something I was doing wrong on my part.

Your camera is a 18mp camera, so is producing images that are 5184 x 3456px, yes?

It's been my experience that uploading a picture at a very large resolution often causes degraded image quality when seen in the gallery frame they are displayed in.

I've uploaded 2 copies of an image. The original is 4000x3000, saved at 100% quality in CS6. The second I've resized to 1600x1200 and then saved, again at 100% quality in CS6.

The 4000x3000 image and the The 1600x1200 image. Open each in a new tab and compare.

Obviously, the bigger the image, the more detail you get when you zoom. However, there are diminishing returns because a really big image looks blurry when it's in the gallery frame it's most often seen in.

My advice is to resize your images prior to uploading them to the gallery in a decent suite (the gimp is free and adequate). I'd pick a middling resolution - I like 1600x1200 for Dakka - but certainly not higher than 1080p. See how that works.

Ooze has it right - it is simply a factor of resizing large images and happens in any software. As yakface says, we are limited in processing power to do really advanced resizing, so we do end up with some blur. You can get around it by shrinking your images a bit manually before uploading. Here is a good guide to doing so without getting blur in photoshop

http://www.sitepoint.com/resize-an-image-in-photoshop/

Thanks for taking the time to reply! I did take Ouze's advice and resized my latest uploads and they were definitely sharper. I managed to use the software provided with the camera so do the resizing.

Photoshop is one of those things I keep telling myself to get to when I get the time. And the time never seems to come. :p

Depending in what you are actually doing with your pictures you might look into Adobe Lightroom. It's all I use for my actual artistic photography and it works great for that. Solid RAW support, workflow management, great editing options, etc.