Computer Question

[Kaye]

I have tried the following a few different times with the same results and hope someone here with more computer smarts than I have can help me understand.

I take a photo and love it on the LCD screen. It looks sharp and well focused. I take this same photo and post it here, flickr and my nephew will use it on his myspace. The photo I post on here looks very close (98-100%) of what I see on the camera. The photo I post on flickr is not as close (app. 90%, but acceptable) of what I see on the camera. And the photo that my nephew post on myspace is no where near the quality that came off the camera (lucky if it is sometimes 75% as good).

Is there a reason for this? Hope someone can help me understand why this happens.

Thanks

[dcclark]

What do you mean by "90% but acceptable" -- can you be more specific about what's different? Colors, sharpness, bands of colors, "jaggies" ... ?

Also, what web browser do you use? Is it Firefox by any chance?

[idcrewdawg]

Many times a website will scale the quality of the photo down to speed up load times. Then when you want to see a full size image of it, it will load the version you were used to seeing.

[Kaye]

By "90% but acceptable" I mean that the photo seems to have lost some of its sharpness/focus when posted on some of the other forums.

[archersdad]

Yep, what dcclark said. All popular image hosting sites will recompress your image in order to save storage space and bandwidth. That's why I host my own as much as possible

[Kaye]

Yes, I use Firefox.. It is twice as fast on my computer than Explorer.

PS:
Just used Firefox and Explorer to view my Flickr account. The difference is amazing. I would love to stay with Explorer, but like I said, it is just really slow on my computer.

[OsmosisStudios]

Here's a fun one: throw an image onto Facebook.

You'll see massive drops in quality.

You should actually be able to see a huge difference between A) photoshop (or a photo-dedicated software), B) your default image view and C) any browser (and even between browsers)

Everything except the A) option will alter the image temporarily in cache to save time/ressources, some more than others.

[dcclark]

The reason I asked about Firefox is that it (for some reason) doesn't use any color management -- so photos don't appear with quite the correct colors. It's unfortunate, and I hope it will be fixed sometime...

[Digidave]

Originally Posted by dcclark

The reason I asked about Firefox is that it (for some reason) doesn't use any color management -- so photos don't appear with quite the correct colors. It's unfortunate, and I hope it will be fixed sometime...

Actually, Firefox 3 does. Check this site for details.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/con...id=7-9311-9478

[dcclark]

Originally Posted by Digidave

Actually, Firefox 3 does. Check this site for details.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/con...id=7-9311-9478

Interesting... although my photos do look noticeably different in Firefox 3 still. Now I no longer know why...