Picture editing- fab.... quality on computer/online- crap?!?

[chloewindle1]

so I touch up photos on PS CS5 and they look great (nothing over edited, maybe brightened ect) put them on FB and they actually look great (for facebook quality), swap onto a different computer and photos look terrible?! one computer they look great on, another computer they look horrid on. WHY?!?!?!?!?! even on photo gallery viewer on the computer they look horrid but on website they look fab!!

 

[PJL]

You can't fully trust how pics look on a screen unless it's been color calibrated.

 

[KmH]

Display calibration can be part of the problem.
A computers color management settings can be another.
A common problem is color space conflicts.

Not all computer displays are equal.
The most common and inexpensive are Twisted Nematic (TN) displays. TN displays have fairly narrow color accurate viewing angles.
Which is why regularly calibrated IPS (In-Plane Switching ) type displays are preferred for image editing.

Other considerations are that not all web browsers and image viewing applications are color aware, or color managed.

Here are some of the basics:
Tutorials on Color Management & Printing

 

[ronlane]

^ +1. Atleast the part I understood, lol. No, Keith is right.

 

[cgipson1]

are you resizing and compressing the files before uploading to Facebook? If not, their compression algorithms will mangle your images. Same for photobucket and other hosting sites.. resize to something reasonable "1024 long side" before uploading... that is probably the issue.(very common complaint)

 

[chloewindle1]

sorry, not sure on how to resize????

 

[cgipson1]

sorry, not sure on how to resize????

Lets say your images are 4288 Pixels x 2848 pixels, Using a software package like Lightroom, Photoshop, GIMP, Picasa, etc... you would change the size to something smaller.... say 1024 x 768 or whatever format fits. Then you would web compress it, saving it as a web image.. that compresses the actual size to whatever compression you feel is suitable, say 60%.

By doing this... Facebook (and other hosts) won't compress it themselves to save on disk space and bandwidth. When they do it, they do it very harshly... overdoing it, make the images look terrible.

Maybe this will help How to make your images look great for Facebook...