Image instantly loses quality when posted online

[Miss DareDevil]

I'm really puzzled by this as I've NEVER known it happen before.

On screen, even full resolution, it looks fine.

However, the second it goes online, I look at the image and I see this terrible mess. It looks as if it was really tiny and I stretched it as far as possible!! Oddly, the one place online where it looks ok is with an image hosting site, photobucket [the image above is hosted by photobucket]

EVERYWHERE else I've tried it, it just falls apart.

I have no idea why this is happening, or what to do about it.

Any ideas??!

This is how it looks when posted on the website:

Regardless whether I posted it full resoltuion or as a small image, that's how it looks. Really pixelated and a mess.

I have just tried uploading a different photo to the same site, in the same way and same size I tried the purple one. The result? Pin sharp.

It really does seem to be the only image that I'm having a problem with - I've never been so confused in all my life! :banghead:

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!!

 

[Miss DareDevil]

Just to add, I've never had any problem like this with the website for any file of any size. Since it uploads everything else perfectly fine it's making me think there's some sort of problem with the file itself. I re-saved it as a gif and a png but unfortunately the same result happened.

Surely the file can't be corrupt if it looks fine on my screen, plus it looks fine with photobucket?

 

[Sideburns]

it's probably resizing it by itself now...

Just use photobucket.

 

[Garbz]

It's a problem related to JPG. The human eye is very sensitive to green and yellow. This is the reason why there are twice as many green pixels on a CCD than red or blue. JPG stores a lot of detail in the green channel. Save a jpeg, open it in photoshop and look at the red green blue channels individually. You'll see the blue is by far the worst.

So as to the reason the picture looks dodgy, and this is only a deductive guess so may not be 100% right: it's known that photobucket flickr and the works compress image. I too have noticed this problem when posting images with soft dark gradients (again jpeg also compressed the darks much more than lights). So you now post an image which contains only a red channel and a blue channel and the online sites which make it look like crap apply their standard (assuming normal colours) jpeg compression to the image, and volah the dominant channel (blue) in the above picture gets screwed along with all the quality.

To double check this and just as a matter of interest if you have a spare sec can you try casting the image bright yellow instead of purple, uploading it to one of the dodgy sites and see if it still causes the problem? I'd be very interested in the results.

 

[Garbz]

Now when a problem like this interests me I can't let it go:

I took the top large good quality image. Resized it to 300 pixels wide, and saved it as a JPEG in photoshop adaptive with the quality slider at 25/100 (on purpose with the purple one to make it look bad). I did the same thing for both images, with the exception that the yellow one went through a hue adjustment first and was set to the same 25/100 quality. The purple came out at 7.17k and the yellow at 9.58k: Here's the result:

 

[Miss DareDevil]

GENIUS!!! :hail::hail::hail:

I still don't quite understand why but when I change it to yellow it works perfectly, any size!

Thanks very much!

 

[Miss DareDevil]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhh... I just re-read your post and it's finally sunk in. I understand now.

Thanks!!