Its Still Losing Quality

Are you checking it at 100% in Photoshop before you upload?

Are you hand-holding the camera when you shoot these low light shots?

judging by the halos, this has been over sharpened, which sharpened the noise. if there is some kind of enhancer that your software is doing - like increasing brightness and stuff like that. this will increase noise. again, shoot in the day to see what the issue is. are you using a digital zoom of any kind? use photoshop if you can, it has a better raw import. raw only means it doesn't do anything special to the image.

also what compression are you using?

if i had to guess - while you said it was raw, this still looks like a jpg that went through some kind of internal camera cleaning. that's why parts are noisy but soft. but this also has motion blur because of the long exposure. on top of that this had aggressive sharpening.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

One way to end this once and for all, upload your full res shot to a file sharing program and send it to a few people you trust.

All I can say is I have uploaded hundreds of my photos and there has been zero degradation of quality. Not sure what you are experiencing.

John, could you do a screen shot example in Photoshop for us ..to show us what to look for. Like get an image that is not suitable screen shot at 100 percent and then another image that is suitable and screen shot it so that it shows the correct sharpness etc..It would make things easier for all of us because many times when I look at an image all over at 100 percent it is crystal clear and then uploaded here it doesn't look that way at all..so what is the catch?

Also when you photograph a drawing or painting and you can see the etching or paint brush strokes ,does that count as not suitable?

@Brandon Nikolajevic if you are talking about the quality on fineartamerica only I have same problem.

All my photographs looks blurry after upload here which sucks...

BUT!

on my artist website they look fine + nobody except for me could see this...

check my thread about it and tell me if it's the same case with your images:

http://fineartamerica.com/showmessages.php?messageid=2235228


@Jean Gabriel Poivre

" Not suitable for what? " - printing? of course not.

Paint brush strokes are one of the most amazing things to look at! You can see how someone's hand followed and created the art



--
www.tgchan.pl
www.tgchan.com

Jean,

Not sure what you are looking for.

I just zoom in to 100% in Photoshop (or more) and check for sharpness. I have had images I really liked but when I zoomed in I killed them because they didn't look sharp enough.

For me it is a matter of trying to be as picky as possible. I may not get it right every time, but I try.

I don't know if that is the case here or if it is something else.

If these are hand held shots in that light it seems to guarantee the images will be soft. Even on a tripod if you don't use mirror lock you can get the blur. I don't know how he is shooting this and how he is editing them.

@tgchan not suitable or of course suitable.. hmm not sure yes or no.. brush strokes yes or no.. thanks Jean

@tgchan ...ummm yeah same issue.. uh yeah ,looks quite different.. sharp vs non sharp

when i look at an image i always look at the tree line. and in the sky. the flat areas show noise when there is some. and branches will show me clarity. if there is a program that cleans the noise aggressively it will show blur and weird artifact swirls. if there is a light amount of noise, it may mean that it was sharpened a bit. in this case the cmos might have been too warm and it created its own noise despite the settings.

i'd like to see the EXIF if possible.

long exposures create new issues, one is the warm cmos, two is the movement if trees. we can also talk focus, its night, it may not be focusing well, and or the aperture might have been wide open, the lens might be dirty on both sides.

in any case day time shots are needed here.


if i look at that tree on the right - it's not all in focus, telling me f 2.8 to maybe f8 was used? the exposure was about 7-10 seconds according to the plane trail. the trees have thick halos, so some kind of editing was done. maybe to make it brighter, enhance contrast or something - something was done. we would need to see images of the original raw shots - where nothing was done.

this site will sharpen things, it's a quirk. but this image had something done to it, maybe just by the software alone.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

What program are you saving it in. Also, what edits are you doing to the RAW files? If all you are doing is 'saving' the raw file and uploading, it's not going to be very good as you need to make adjustments to raw images (post processing) before they are ready for the world.

Brandon,

Send Mike the file, just a small one and he'll let you know what's up. Or send me the file........

Rich

@Mike I have noticed many images being so sharp here when uploaded.. when looking at them in a photo editor or photoshop.. they look soft and natural but when uploaded here the clarity is blazing.. so which is correct.. blazing or soft.. and which will print blazing or soft?

whatever you had in your machine - thats correct. this site increases brightness a bit and pushes up the sharpness. while at the same time reduces your compression so you get a smashy looking image depending on colors.

as for settings - i suggest for you to use the same settings you used for the avatar, which is oddly gone from your gallery.

still shoot in the day time, so we can determine a few things. do this same scene.



---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Hmmm @Mike, Not sure exactly which avatar as I have changed several over the last few days.."still shoot in the day time, so we can determine a few things. do this same scene."
Sorry Mike Im a bit lost with what you said here in the quotes..

no the message was for the op. the star field he has up has good settings, and their wasn't a problem with this shot. its just all the other shots that seem to be having issues. i was answering two people at once... in my head it sounded right.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

@ Jean Gabriel Poivre

" Paint brush strokes are one of the most amazing things to look at! You can see how someone's hand followed and created the art "

Of course, it's fine :)


--
www.tgchan.pl
www.tgchan.com

Thanks,@tgchan

I feel exactly the same.. Jean

Seriously though, you were advised repeatedly my many professional level photographers to take a photo during the day.

If you won't at least follow that first step provided in the advise then I've lost interest

and if your wondering what difference it makes. we want to see a normal image. at night you have motion blur, focus issues due to lack of contrast, long exposure issues, maybe even built in compensating. during the day we can narrow down what's happening.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I'll disagree with some of the advice here. The issue is apparent degradation of photo quality after upload to Pixels.com
The key word is apparent.
FAA NEVER displays your uploaded full resolution photo, even in the so-called full resolution "green box loupe" preview.
That preview is severely compressed, and often/usually shows compression artifacts.

FAA uses your high resolution uploaded image for two purposes only.
1. To print orders made by customers.
2. To generate lower quality display images.

The only exception to this might be if you upload a rather low resolution image. which will display at normal screen display sizes without being resized smaller.

In this image, I see some sensor dust in the sky, perhaps, some noise, expected with long exposures of dark areas, and most notably compression artifacts, fringes between sky and palm trees, due to JPG compression artifacts. Of these, FAA would only have "added" the compression artifacts.

I'll also add an unsolicited critique, rather strongly stated: I don't imagine there is much of a market for scenes of this rather mundane nature. The light trail of the airplane is the photo's most notable feature, and it doesn't have much to commend it to user's novelty or artistic merit. So there is a lot of technical discussion here when you should instead be concentrating on aesthetics.

My image quality of my pictures on fine art America is worse (more, blurry and more noise) than the ones I have saved on my computer. They Decrease quality after I upload them to the site. And I did use the same setting as my avatar and I took it off because everyone kept bashing me that it wasn't my photo and I was really annoyed with it.

I explained that. It's JPG compression. The print will be exactly what you uploaded. What you see here is NOT what you uploaded, and is never as good. Concentrate more on making images that customers will actually want to buy.

Justin, I have had this shot for a while in the day time, I never really liked it but since you guys want me to upload a day time shot i uploaded it. But even this one loses quality when I upload it, it gets blur and grain at the bottom.

You are right, Brandon. It is NEVER displayed at full resolution and quality, as I have said before. This is to prevent theft of your images, but it does obviously diminish the presentation of your images somewhat.. But the exact file you upload IS used for making prints, with no degradation whatsoever. I don't know how to say it more clearly. It is "just how it works".

Ok thank you for clarifying, so if I bought my own image it would be in full quality?

Yes.

Ok thank you.

no.

the close up may have some compression and sharpening issues. but it won't fix the lack of resolution or blurring from the focus or tree movement.

the daytime shot - did you shoot this through a window? i see smears in the sky. and what settings did you use? can you copy the exif and post it here. this site will not make the sky as noisy as this is showing.

if i had to judge it - i would say that your iso is set to like 1600, and your raw converter is trying to clean it up, or save it with too much compression because i do see blocks to a certain point. it's light, but i see a pattern. do you have another site you can post this too where we can see it close up?

and do you have anything in your camera where its set to show extra detail in the shadows? because that bright desert shot, should have shadows, and i see vague grayish areas, with a lot of noise.

my camera has a contrast boost and shadow fixer something and it will generally give more detail at the expense of other things, and i'm thinking that's whats happening here. the close up isn't ever this bad.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Brandon, is there a how-to book written specifically for YOUR camera? It looks as though your camera settings aren't right. Even on an automatic setting, the daylight photo should have come out clearer. Something is off there. I thought I could tackle digital photography by reading various general books and getting advice here, but it wasn't until I found a book specifically for my camera, I was "getting it." Trying to pick and choose advice from different sources was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with a blindfold on. The camera manuals are dry and not always helpful. Once you get advice specifically for YOUR camera, things will go much more smoothly, I can promise you that. Good luck!!

Well the camera I was using was broken and I took it back and now I have a new one. The pictures weren't turning out right, and it wasn't because of my settings, I even called someone about it and they didn't know either so I took it back.

but we are talking about this particular camera, the one you just used for these images. there is a setting in there that is not set up right in this current camera. if you can copy the exif out of there and post it here, it may help.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I believe he is referring to the camera he used to capture the daytime image.

but the point of uploading the day time shot was to see what's going on with the camera that he's using to shoot at night

brandon is this camera that shot the day image - the same as the one that you used to shoot the night image? now i'm confused.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

All of the problems you describe would be in his original, not made worse by uploading. I think it's better to focus the discussion on what is the cause of the degradation of the uploaded image, which is just that FAA/Pixels intentionally limits the quality of our views to discourage image piracy. All of the things you are discussing are OTHER defects that will be in his edited original, and not mysteriously appear when he uploads.

Same here and if indeed it is the same then he has answered his own concerns with quality as they weren't good to begin with do camera error.

it occured to me, what computer do you have? i ask because i remember someone having a mac or something, and it corrected and smoothed the image out so it would look good on the screen. so if you uploaded it here, your screen at home may indeed look good, but online it may be showing all the noise and what have you. make sure your computer doesn't have some kind of graphic smoothing.

my TV has that, it cleans noise on the fly and makes it seem smoother. and your computer may very well be doing the same thing.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I have a Dell alienware 14x

He's looking at his original and the FAA image on the same PC, so that's probably not relevant.

but something is amiss. at a 100% on his screen, he should see the noise


see how they compressed my image? around contrasts you'll see a fuzzy edge of kind of like a blurry kind of areas, but if you click it, it's clean and sharp. but if you


click on the sky in this, its very noisy

PLUS YOUR LENS IS FILTHY clean both sides, that streak should not be there. clean the cmos as well - there are issues there as well. this image won't print as it stands.

if you click on the sky you see 100% - a lot of noise, your computer should show this at 100%, if you can't then i'm not sure what the issue is.

right now i can only blame the RAW software from your camera, it might be showing it cleaner than it actually is, and your browser is viewing it exactly like it actually is - which is a dirty background and noise.

or its enhancing the image by boosting shadow detail as it saves.

try this again - day light shot - jpg, finest quality, and clean the lens off on both sides first. and if the camera has a clean CMOS option, do that, otherwise get it cleaned professionally. unless you shot this through a window, then in that case - open the window first.

as a jpg, we can remove the raw software as a possibility, even though i do expect it to clean the jpg a bit.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

also when you out in the dirt like that, don't take the lens off for any reason, i think dirt is getting into the camera.


edit - what was the point of this thread then? why close it?

we are trying to help you here, showing us that your camera takes noisy shots and that your lens/cmos is dirty, won't help you out at all. i can tell you that the close up is accurate, your images are noisy. simple as that. why its not showing up on you machine when you edit them is beyond me. but if your not willing to experiment and just want to blame the site instead, then fine, but it's not the site, its your camera or set up.



---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

I just wanted you guys to see my daytime shot and how it loses quality I am going to take it off now and close the thread. Thanks for the help.