[Bob in St. Louis]

A.C. gallery


photobucket Actual file size 2.8 Meg


Nathanm's magic


Post I made of page 28 of 'picture of the day' thread:

Quote, "{Why is it so grainy here?}"


Taken With: NIKON CORPORATION NIKON D40
File Size: 359 kb - 800x532 Taken On: 2007:12:15 00:39:07
Camera Make: NIKON CORPORATION Camera Model: NIKON D40
Date/Time: 2007:12:15 00:39:07 Resolution: 800 x 532
Flash Used: Yes Focal Length: 55.0mm
Exposure Time: 0.017 s (1/60) Aperture: f/5.6
ISO Equiv.: 400 Whitebalance: Auto
Metering Mode: matrix


Apparently it's an issue on my end, since "ooheadsoo", "Nathanm", and "JohnR" say it looks fine on their end?   
In MS Paint, it looks fine.

[JohnR]

Hi Bob, for web viewing, images need to be resized to much lower resolution than what your camera delivers. While your originals that you are viewing on your PC are (about) 3000x2000 pixels, the images shown above are actually 639x425 (AC) and 800x532 (photobucket) pixels in size.

When you upload a large image to a web server, the web server will automatically resize it i.e. reduce it to a size more compatible with web viewing. Apart from the reduction in size, you will generally lose sharpness, and more compression will be applied resulting in loss of detail.

You will generally get best results if you resize the image to web size on your own PC, and get it to look how you want there, before uploading. Then, you will want to make sure you upload it somewhere where the web server won't decide to recompress the image to save space, for instance. (I use my own online gallery so I'm not able to give specific recommendations... sorry to say but the AC gallery is not a good choice as it is set up for preserving bandwidth and disk space and not image quality... )

[Bob in St. Louis]

Understood John, thank you!
Due to the holidays, I haven't been to work in a week. Now that I'm here viewing these on a Compaq 15" CRT (1024X768), all three look MUCH better than at home. At home I'm using a 19" flat panel, resolution unknown but I can't believe it would be worse.
Now I'm really confused! How could this be?

Bob

[JohnR]

Ah. Some LCDs (like the one in my work laptop, for instance) just don't do a good job with images. I bought an HP LCD for use with the work laptop at home, which is OK for viewing but for the moment I am keeping the old CRT for my own computer.

We had a thread on LCDs not too long ago:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=44251.0

[boead]

Bob, they look beautiful on my monitor. I have a 22” Viewsonic and an ATI X1900 video card. No grain at all, just a less then desirable LCD and/or video device.

[nathanm]

Bob said he was using AOL, now if I remember correctly AOL does some automatic image stuff to everything.  I've never used it myself, though.  Does AOL have its own browser application or is it just an ISP service?  I know IE has that feature where it will scale down images too large to fit within the current window, and that's going to be a Nearest-Neighbor kind of thing which will cause pixellation.  I suspect if there's pixellation visible it means there's been a browser-based scaling.

[drphoto]

Make sure your monitor is set to "millions of colors" not "thousands". This can cause an image to look grainy.

[Bob in St. Louis]

Monitor at home is a 19" Dell, set to (1280-1024). Video card is NVIDIA GeForce 6800 32 Bit. This card doesn't have choices of how many colors, just how many 'bits', either 16 or 32.

John, thanks for the LCD link, I'll check that out later today.

Not sure about what AOL does "for me", but they do plenty so I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with the final solution.
AOL (in my case) is both the ISP and the browser¹. Yes, I put all my eggs in one basket, thought it'd be easier, less complicated that way. 
Could this have something to do with having a dial-up connection and AOL "dumbing it down" for faster page load speeds?
At work I still use my AOL account, but on a IE browser, if memory serves we have a T1 connection there.

I can't blame the display at this point. Like I've said, I've seen some of the most beautiful photos in this forum (eye-fidelity), so I know the capability exists. I've used this PC/monitor for gaming, surfing the web, viewing 16:9 home movies, and just for grins I've even popped in a DVD and watched a movie.

Thanks guys,
Bob

¹ I've been unable to stay logged in at the Hawthorne forum when I'm at home. At work is no problem. It's been mentioned be a few that AOL is the possible cause of this as well??

[ctviggen]

32 bits is an indication of the color palette.  See:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/3/32_bit.html

24 bits gives 2^24 different colors (well, assuming black and white are colors).  I think it's 8 bits for red, 8 for green, and 8 for blue.  0,0,0 is black and FF, FF, FF is white (if I remember correctly).