ipad2 photo transfer quality question?

[ahcigar1]

I was hoping to get a little bit of help from you all. I recently bought myself an ipad2 when the rate was reduce in hopes to have a portable portfolio to show potential clients some of my work. I'm having a bit of a problem getting my photos to look as sharp and clear as they should though when I downsize them. When I view them on print or on my computer even at 100% they are clean, sharp, and vibraint. But when I downsize them and transfer them to my ipad they are softer and not very clear at all and I deffinitely don't want to be showing my photos at barely subpar quality. Any tips of how to do this? When I downsize them I save them as jpeg 800pixles for longest side at highest quality and standard save. Is this correct or should I be saving them another way? How do you all transfer your photos?

 

[analog.universe]

800 pixels on the long side is too small for viewing. The iPad 2 is not a particularly high resolution display, at 1024x768, but you will at least need your images to be that large to get the most out of it.

 

[Big Mike]

The resolution of the screen is 1024 x 768 pixels. So for 100% 1:1 viewing, you should resize your images to 1024 pixels long. However, you (or your clients) may want to zoom into the image. So if you want the zoom-in to look just as sharp, you will want twice that size. So resize them to 2048 pixels on the long side.

There is no need to save them at the highest JPEG quality setting. In Photoshop, the quality scale goes to 12 (max), and it's practically impossible to visually tell the difference between 12 and 10....but the file size will be dramatically reduced. For this purpose, I'd suggest you could easily go down to 7 or 8, giving you very small file sizes, and nobody would be able to see a lack of quality (provided the images were good to begin with).

 

[ahcigar1]

Thank you for the tips everyone. I will do double size like you suggest Big Mike cause just to be on the safe side. And I had no idea that the quality doesn't change much from 12 - 7 or so. I will surely save them smaller to save me room since I could only afford the 16GB version.

 

[KmH]

And I had no idea that the quality doesn't change much from 12 - 7 or so.

Be careful. The quality setting you will want to use will necessarily vary from image to image depending on image content.

 

[Alex_B]

Well,

I do use the Ipad 2 for presenting images for quite some while now. Resolution to me appears fine, as long as you do not touch the screen with your nose (which gives ugly stains anyway).

To demonstrate general quality, just having a few magnified crops from images ready might be fine already.

Sometimes rescaling the image to native iPad resolution in Photoshop with a subsequent careful sharpening gives the best results in my case. I usually use the simple sharpening of Ps and then reduce the effect to 60%. This is usually done in a batch job. Then I go through the images and redo it for those where the sharpening caused bad artifacts (e.g. images with lots of fine detail such as sand or structures prone to Moire-patterns).

 

[ahcigar1]

Thank you for the tips KmH Alex_B

 

[Edward74]

To demonstrate general quality, just having a few magnified crops from images ready might be fine already.

 

[printsnpaints]

In importing photos via syncing, the photos are autimatically optimized for the iPad. How do you transfer your photos to your iPad, anyway? Do you use apps like DropBox?