Photo losing sharpness

[ImageArray]

You'll have to excuse the question if the answer is simple but remember I am a noob to both photography and photoshop. My question is this, why is it that when I have my pictures in photoshop all edited nicely and looking great, when I load them onto the web (be it on here or wordpress or facebook) the quality of the image (mainly the sharpness) disappears? For example I have a great picture of my son that looks awesome on my computer but the minute I load it onto the web it looks horrible! Can anyone explain this to me? Below is the image that's been loaded onto the web - it does not look good at all. It's almost choppy looking (especially noticable on his yellow shirt). The copy I have on my desktop does not look like this, it's clean and sharp and it looks great compared to this. I just don't get it.

 

[Ryan L]

Yeah facebook compresses the heck out of them. Best to resize them to 604x604 and make sure your color profile is sRGB when saving for facebook. I still find that they don't look 100%, but better.

 

[Robin Usagani]

Because facebook compresses the photo automatically. Sometimes good sometimes bad. Usually the light colored photos don't turn out very well. If you want it to look good you should compress it by your self. Change the ppi to 72 and make the size to whatever facebook shows.

 

[reznap]

You're letting the website resize the photo for you, and most websites do a bad job. The resolution of that is 720px × 540px, wayyyy smaller than the original I'm sure. I like to copy my image, in 16-bit colorspace, and then resize my canvas to whatever dimensions... 720x540 for you in this case. Then I paste the picture on top as a new layer. I scale it down, maybe 10-20% and run a pass of unsharp mask at 200% strength with a radius of 0.3 pixels and threshold level of 150. I do that about 5 times until the image is the size I want. Then I usually smart sharpen at a radius of 0.5 pixels at about 15% strength.

Here's an example of a result:

 

[Derrel]

BAD image re-sizing and BAD image compression routines used by many social media sites and by some photo storage sites can really play havoc with your photos. ALSO, there can be color profile mis-matches; your computer's image editing softeware might be showing you the images in Adobe RGB format, but when you upload the images, it's quite possible that your images have not had an sRGB color profile assigned to them...soooooo...if you are using most Windows browsers, the browsers are NOT color-aware, and will show you a dull,lifeless-looking image...

You need to know what color space you are capturing images in; if you set your camera to capture in sRGB mode, and edit in that mode, and assign that profile to your photos before uploading them to the web, you SHOULD be able to get a grip on things,and get a reasonably consistent,predictable "look" from start to finish. Also, for social media sites, it's helpful to begin with a rather small original photo, say 1000 pixels on the long axis, not SOOC and 4,382x pixels tall!

I think assigning an sRGB color profile to images being uoploaded to the world wide web is critical.

 

[Ryan L]

You're letting the website resize the photo for you, and most websites do a bad job. The resolution of that is 720px × 540px, wayyyy smaller than the original I'm sure. I like to copy my image, in 16-bit colorspace, and then resize my canvas to whatever dimensions... 720x540 for you in this case. Then I paste the picture on top as a new layer. I scale it down, maybe 10-20% and run a pass of unsharp mask at 200% strength with a radius of 0.3 pixels and threshold level of 150. I do that about 5 times until the image is the size I want. Then I usually smart sharpen at a radius of 0.5 pixels at about 15% strength.

Here's an example of a result:

What are you doing this for??? Seems like this came out of left field!

 

[reznap]

What are you doing this for??? Seems like this came out of left field!

Uh, she asked how to prepare a photo to look good for the web.

... why is it that when I have my pictures in photoshop all edited nicely and looking great, when I load them onto the web (be it on here or wordpress or facebook) the quality of the image (mainly the sharpness) disappears? The copy I have on my desktop does not look like this, it's clean and sharp and it looks great compared to this. I just don't get it.

:er:

 

[Ryan L]

I dunno rez, that looks oversharpened as heck! lol and alot of work for a social site!

I think the issue she was referring to were the facebook compression issues that plague everyone on there, but maybe not. She did mention this site as well, but I have never had any issue posting to here. Maybe its the hosting she is using.

 

[Flash Harry]

You need to downsize images to 72dpi/ppi whatever you like to call it, also reduce the size in inches/centimetres TO 6X4 or 7x5 or the site software will still compress, I do this in three stages with about 150% usm on the first stage reducing to about 50% on the other two stages, then use the save for web in PS before uploading, this also makes them pretty useless to image thieves. H