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Hello all,

I have been noticing that as of late, the Dakka Dakka gallery seems to be making my photos look very fuzzy and grainy. To double check, and make sure it was not my camera doing it, I uploaded a photo of mine to Photobucket, then posted it and compared it to the photos I have uploaded to the Dakka gallery. Sure enough, the Photobucket photo was not at all fuzzy. Here, let me show you...

Dakka Gallery photo


Photobucket photo



See what I mean?? What is going on with the gallery? Any ideas?

_Tim?

The dakka gallery compresses it ever so slightly as that makes a massive difference in how much we can store. The resizing algorithms are a little fuzzy so that they dont take forever to run, but quality is still fairly good with them compared to things like your web browser resizing. You are not really comparing like with like on your pictures as the photobucket one is cropped and zoomed but I freely admit that because we reprocess all images there will be a slightly lower quality. Preprocess your images to cut out whitespace and you'll hopefully find you get better results.

Well, they are both the same size, in pixels, and the Photobucket one was not cropped, so I guess I will just have to use Photobucket from now on.

_Tim?

Here is a direct comparison between the two photos in question. One is from your photobucket account, the other I have uploaded to dakka's gallery (2nd one). To be honest, comparing them side by side I can see very little difference. Try using the 'full size' drop down option when embedding images in the forums if you want to ensure the largest, highest quality images, as the recommended sizes are resized to 600 pixels which would indeed add fuzziness.

Thanks, legoburner! That really helps me out.

_Tim?

I noticed this with a picture, too, and was a little curious as to what I was seeing. The explanation makes sense... but I would've thought intuitively, that shrinking a picture wouldn't make it a tad fuzzier (even with compression), only expanding it.

If I want a really clear one I'll just crop it and post up a "zoomed in" version that I can show at full size