XP -Picture and Fax Viewer

[JenLJ]

I have a silly question. Why when you view your pics with the pic. viewer in XP it looks great displayed the size of the "entire" monitor, yet posting a small or even med size JPEG on a website can sometimes make the photo look horrible. Detail wise? I know some post their photos to where they're really big here and look great, but for some reason, my photos never really look the way they look on my monitor once they get on a site. Am I doing something wrong? Is there something different in the way XP pic viewer diplays them, than websites?

THANKS!

[PacAce]

Hi, Jenn,

A buddy of mine is using ofoto and he said that at this site the photos that are posted are sized down and compressed so that anybody wanted to download the photo can do so without having to wait forever, especially if they're using dial-up modems. However, they also keep the original in case somebody wants to order a hardcopy. The downsized image would not be good for printing so they'd have to use the original (and larger) photo.

This might be the case as well for the site you're referring to. A good test is to download your image and see if it's the original one in terms of size and compression.

[JenLJ]

I thought to perhaps it was either shutterfly or the other, but decided to try out Pbase. I uploaded my boat image and it looked the same on Pbase as it did on the other two sites. As well as a few other pics. I tried to post the image directly from my folder in the "My pictures" site (since that's where they look their best) here once and it worked and the image looked great, but for some reason, can't do that anymore. I'll have to find a place to store my images where they don't compress as you said. I'm looking into getting paint shop pro, and I'm pretty sure that this program allows you to store, share and save image as "Is". This technical stuff is really giving me a headache :(

Thanks so much for your input!!!!

[Conk]

Jen,
This won't likely have anything to do with your dilemma but have you calibrated your monitor?

[JenLJ]

Not too sure what that means, but haven't done anything to my monitor. I'll continue to investigate ???
Thank you.

:~(

[bigdave]

Ok ok people, before ya'll get all willy nilly over this... I gotta ask some important questions of Jen. I read through this thread and I can't find anything that describes your problem. Do the pictures applear blurry compared to the monitor size image? Are the colors represented on the screen different? Finally (the most important question) are you allowing ofoto, or pbase to resize your photos, or are you doing it yourself using photoshop or something else?

If you've already shelled out the bucks for Adobe PhotoShop, or even the inexpensive Photo Elements, here's what you can try.

Image > Image Size > change the image resolution to 72 pixels/inch > enter your new dimensions > ...
At the bottom of the dialog box, Resample Image should be checked. The default is bicubic, but try changing to biLINEAR. Most times, that'll do the trick. If detail still seems blurry, undo the change, and try again using Nearest Neighbor instead.

Paint Shop Pro seems pretty powerful from what I've heard, but I also guarantee you'll get much better support from the web community if you go with something from Adobe Software. IMO Photoshop is the Porsche of digital image processing, Paint shop pro is maybe the Jaguar. Of course its up to you, but you can even look around on posts here to see that when someone says... "hey the greens in that shot are great, how'd you get them so bright?" the reply is probably gonna start with "Open up photoshop and..."

Well good luck Jen!

[JenLJ]

Dave-Thanks!

To answer some of your questions, YES, the images appear very blurry when posted anywhere, than when displayed on my monitor. The colors are fine, it's just the sharpness of the image. Like I said, blurry. As for Pbase and ofoto. Ofoto definitely compresses image. They dot hat they said because of space. Pbase, how would I know if they do the same or, how can i prevent that from happening? As for PS. My fiances brother has 7, and lets just say, it's not for me........LOL If anything, I use the acr soft to just sharpen, change contrast or crop. Not really interested in changing anything else. Not now anyway. I'm still learning my camera and
pixels, don't need to jump into anything like that anytime soon ;) In arc soft I noticed there's a botton that allows you to "Create New". Select size, width height in pixels, In. and cm. Also resolution AND, data size in KB. Don't know what it all means exactly. Thanks for your help. All I really want to do is prevent my images from appearing BLURRY when i post them :(

Thanks Dave-
Jenn