Image Quality

1. 58

   Sqoo Mediaposted 16 years ago

   I am writing a hub entitled 'How to spot a bad web designer' and one of the things I need to do is to illustrate a number of image quality issues. Unfortunately, HubPages reduce the quality of images dramatically completely obliterating my examples with JPEG artifacts. I can't see any way to host images on my own server instead of HubPages and have them displayed in a Hub.
   
   The alternative is to provide links to images on my server which of course is less than ideal as I would love to have the illustrations on-page.
   
   I hope I am missing a trick, anyone?

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2. 72

   relacheposted 16 years ago

   I find I don't have problems with photo capsules and image quality, provided the image is actually of a large enough size and quality to start with.  You may not have explored the photo capsule fully, but since it can be modified to make an image two column widths, one column width or even half that, I find it really does handle all my image needs inside a Hub.
   
   It's only when an image is very small and very low resolution that I find I'm not happy with the appearance.

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3. 58

   Sqoo Mediaposted 16 years ago

   Its more a case that it converts everything to jpegs with a low image quality, which in most cases would be acceptable but I'm specifically talking about image quality in this hub and can't show  examples that have been messed with to the extent that HubPages do.
   
   I don't think there is a solution unfortunately.

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4. 72

   relacheposted 16 years ago

   You can upload pictures that are up to 4MB in size, and you can enable an option whereby the viewer can see the original image (res and size) so if that still doesn't work for you, I guess you're just out of luck.

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5. 58

   Sqoo Mediaposted 16 years ago

   I gave up trying and went with the degraded images
   
   If you look at the hub, you will see one of the very problems I criticise on every image which is a bot of a shame, I think HP reduce image quality a little too much, why change small filesize GIFs into JPEGS? Seems a bit pointless to me to mess with images when they don't need it!
   
   http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-spot-a-bad-web-designer

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6. 59

   Mark Knowlesposted 16 years ago

   I have the same problem when trying to show quality of different camera images. The way I have got round it is to live with the degraded image on the hubpage and add a link to the full size image somewhere else.

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   1. 62

      SunSevenposted 16 years agoin reply to this

      You don't have to live with degraded images!
      
      All you have to do is enable the pop-up option when you upload the photos.
      
      Best Regards

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      1. STAFF

         pauldeedsposted 16 years agoin reply to this

         That's true, the original image can also be linked to on the HubPages server if you want (you don't have to put up somewhere else).  We'd like to offer better support for non-photographic images in the gif or png formats, but it just hasn't made it to the top of our queue yet.  All I can do is advise right now is that you to start with the largest, highest quality image that you can.

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7. 59

   Mark Knowlesposted 16 years ago

   Sunseven:
   
   http://press.nikonusa.com/images/D3/Cor … SO1600.jpg
   http://press.nikonusa.com/images/D3/Joe … ISO200.jpg
   
   As far as I could tell - these are too big.
   
   Paul - So can we host these here ourselves?

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8. STAFF

   pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

   The maximum size we allow for uploaded images is 4 megabytes.  I think those may be just a little too big, sorry.   However, there isn't anything special about that limit, so I think I may be able to up it a bit (give me a day or so).
   
   Cameras seem to be putting out larger and larger files every day (although in consumer models I think the file resolution is often beyond the level of detail the CCDs can actually capture).

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9. 59

   Mark Knowlesposted 16 years ago

   OK - That's what I thought. If it's of any interest, think 12-15 megabytes over the next 2 years or so at this quality. Of course, that is the top end only but Canon already have a pro-level camera putting out 12.1 megs:
   
   http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosd/eos1ds … rtrait.jpg
   
   Huge.

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10. 58

    Sqoo Mediaposted 16 years ago

    Thanks for replying Paul, will be great to have GIF and PNG support
    
    Mark, how about using magnified detail for your comparrisons? At 800% you can get a good idea of any distortion and artifacts in the image, unfortunately the HP jpeg compression will still add its own but at least you wont need huge images.

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11. 58

    Sqoo Mediaposted 16 years ago

    I have enabled pop-ups (thanks S7). Strangely enough the popup window is sized slightly smaller than the image itself, so that the image is resized in the window, meaning it still doesn't look right but it is an improvement!
    
    (This is in FireFox)

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12. STAFF

    pauldeedsposted 16 years ago

    The pop up is the original unaltered image, so it will be whatever size the original image was.
    
    One method that may work to reduce artifacts in photos would be to size your original image to exactly the dimensions it will end up in the hub yourself.   This would mean, depending on how you've configured the capsule, a width of 120px, 248px, 260px, 496px, or 520px, with the height depending on the aspect ratio of the original image. I haven't actually tried this, but it may help a little, especially when the original is close to that size anyway.  I don't think it will help much in the conversion from gif or png to jpeg, however.

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13. 58

    Sqoo Mediaposted 16 years ago

    Paul, you may want to try the second image capsule down in the hub I linked to above in FF, it is squashed by a few pixels, (look at the tick and cross, then enlarge the window)
    
    
    btw are you using GDLib to do the resizing?

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