Graphic image quality issues

[carisma_sensei]

I know this isn't really related to the styles in Dreamwidth, but I don't know where to ask about this and, since most of us make graphics and use them in our layouts, I thought it would be a good place to ask for help. Please feel free to delete or ignore if irrelevant.

I noticed that when uploading graphics that are high quality (imagine, a Header that I want to use in a DW layout), the image gets reduced no matter what image hosting I use. In fact, when I preview it in my computer, it looks good, high quality and all that. But once I upload it to, say, imgur, it looks like they rescaled it a bit! Like they made it a bit bigger, I don't know why.
If I zoom out the browser, the image looks just like I saved it to my PC. But once I put the browser's zoom back to normal, it looks like they compressed the image and made it bigger too.

I don't know if this has happened to any of you, but being a designer and graphic maker, I'm a bit sad about this and I don't know what gives. Have you experienced this? I've had this with every image hosting service I tried. Am I going crazy? xD I don't do anything different and have been making graphics since 2006 so believe me I'm a bit confused about this.

Comments

[syntheid]

Not sure, just kinda throwing out ideas but:

I think a lot (all?) of the free image hosting sites will perform some sort of optimizations... imgur may have changed their algorithms recently? I'm not sure why they're messing with the actual sizing, though. And if the file size of this header is very large, that could be the issue. It seems like imgur's limit is pretty big, though. https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000083326-What-files-can-I-upload-

Could also be if you have a higher resolution monitor, the picture is bigger than it seems to you. I've noticed that Photoshop especially has some weird stuff going on about pixel density and tends to make pictures look smaller than they do in image preview on the same monitor. And I know when I take screencaps on retina, they end up double-sized on 1:1 ratio monitors.

[carisma_sensei]

Hi! Thanks for taking the time to help me out :3

Yes! It deffinitely looks like the image is smaller in Photoshop and then when I upload and use it, it looks bigger? I don't know, it's been a while since I coded or made anything graphics wise (I came back to it last week) but in all the experience I've had in graphics and layout making, I've never had this happen.

That being said, I have a huge monitor at the moment so maybe it's messing a bit with the images...in some way I don't understand xD

Anyway, thanks for the reply, seems like there's not much I can do about it so I'll just have to get used to it ^^

[fueschgast]

I had a similar problem once. Mine turned out to be a browser setting that loaded images in low quality to save bandwidth.

[carisma_sensei]

Wow! Such a thing can happen? xD Do you happen to remember how you looked at it to see if that happens with mine?

[fueschgast]

If it's a browser thing, other people's graphics look low-quality too.

[carisma_sensei]

I did some research on that matter and tried this. Changing the value from -1.0 to 1.0 makes the browser to zoom out and, then, the images look like they are intended to. Problem is that then everything looks too small in this monitor screen size haha. I guess I'll have to live with it! Thanks again for the help :3

[montuos]

Check your settings in your hosting accounts. For instance, you'll find an "Upload images in high quality" ticky-box at https://imgur.com/account/settings.

Hosting sites used to upload images exactly as you sent them, but five-ish years ago, one by one they started defaulting to uploading and storing lower-res versions. Google at least informed us they were doing that (which is how I now know to check), but I don't think many others did.

[carisma_sensei]

Thanks!! I ticked that box and I still have the same problem so I guess it's all about my monitor which is kinda new. But! Thanks for telling me about that option, otherwise I would have never noticed ^^

[momijizukamori]

If you're still trying to sort this out, as a test, can you save your image back off one of the hosting sites where it looks weird, and then open it and your original side-by-side in the same program? That might narrow down if the site is actually altering the image, or if it's just rendering differently there.