Why your pictures look like crap.

[SensePhoto]

Am I the only one that is somewhat happy with their picture and then when it's being viewed on a different monitor it looks all pixilated and flat?

I use my 27" iMac at home to do my editing, when I’m done with a file I export it to the hard drive and upload it online without messing with its size which results in 15-25mb per file uploaded.

I come to work where we have maybe 3-4 years old Dell monitors and my picture doesn’t look sharp anymore, the lines are skewed and it’s just plain grey and unfun....while other images I see here on the same monitor are still mesmerizing....what do you recommend doing about that? I heard something about converting images to 16 or 8 bit but i don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the integrity of the shot.

Example:

 

[mikehaugen]

I would recommend resizing and maybe flattening them and saving them separately as a "for web" version. Most people aren't expecting the highest quality photos from the internet, but you would still have the larger files if you ever wanted to print them. This is of course assuming that you are uploading them for the web and not for some kind of archiving.

 

[LarissaPhotography]

I know when we post images online, we've occasionally gotten complaints about the images only to find out that it was all their monitor. It would be nice if everyone had amazing equipment when they viewed our images.

 

[mikehaugen]

This may be a stupid question but has anyone noticed if different browsers display images differently?

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

Yes, not all browsers are colorspace aware.

 

[usayit]

What online service are you posting to?

Some will compress the incoming images to save space thus munging up the details.

 

[SensePhoto]

What online service are you posting to?

Some will compress the incoming images to save space thus munging up the details.

Photobucket.....

 

[RONDAL]

photobucket = poo

 

[The_Traveler]

Holy crap
It's you who are sabotaging your images.
Hosting a multi-layer, multi-megabyte psd and expecting it to display well on the web is crazy, wrong and totally wasteful of time and disk space.
You should be editing in a wide color space like adobe RGB for best printing but converting to sRGB for display on the web.
Never, ever expect the hosting servers to reduce to viewing size and resharpen.
Host at the size you will display.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to do some reading.

AND if you put good pictures, well prepared, sized and corrected on Photobucket, they will look great.
I will match my pictures on there for faithful color and detail with anyone's.

 

[ronda]

Are you shooting Raw or Jpeg? What software are you using? What is your editing workflow?

 

[Derrel]

Assign an sRGB profile to the images so that the multiple "dumb" and "colorblind" web browsers for Windoze will know how to display the image. Since you are probably editing in AdobeRGB, and sRGB images tend to look flat and ugly, you might also consider adding around 12 to 15% saturation to images destined to be seen on Windoze boxes displaying images in sRGB color space on dumb browsers. As far as sending larger images of 15 to 25 megabytes to a storage site, and allowing the site to down-sample the images---go back up to The Traveler's post, #9, for your dose of excoriation and shaming.

 

[SensePhoto]

Are you shooting Raw or Jpeg? What software are you using? What is your editing workflow?

Shooting RAW, using lightroom 3, as far as workflow the example in the first post is HDR so what i do is a desaturate the exposure images just a bit and add a bit of sharpness before exporting them to photomatix or Efex Pro, after i do the tone mapping the image is automatically imported back to lightroom where i use selective saturation levels to make the image look the way i want it. I use that workflow most of the time and open to suggestions.

 

[SensePhoto]

Holy crap
It's you who are sabotaging your images.
Hosting a multi-layer, multi-megabyte psd and expecting it to display well on the web is crazy, wrong and totally wasteful of time and disk space.
You should be editing in a wide color space like adobe RGB for best printing but converting to sRGB for display on the web.
Never, ever expect the hosting servers to reduce to viewing size and resharpen.
Host at the size you will display.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to do some reading.

AND if you put good pictures, well prepared, sized and corrected on Photobucket, they will look great.
I will match my pictures on there for faithful color and detail with anyone's.

Here's a screenshot of setting that my files are being exported by default....looks like its already set to sRGB. (great picture btw)

Do you guys save your final images as TiFF extension or JPEG?

 

[SensePhoto]

Same picture but with the following setting

Hard to say if it helped at all but it went from being 16mb to 1.8mb

 

[The_Traveler]

Quality setting is way off.
Since screen is medium quality at best, export at 60 quality or less for viewing on the screen.
Make long edge 1000 pixels
There is a plugin on Jeff Friedl's site that will automatically export at different qualities so you can pick the lowest quality with good resolution.

Lew