JPG vs RAW format.

[brianw999]

Last night I was sitting in the sun outside work waiting to finish my shift when a Virgin sponsored Cameron hot air balloon came over at low level. The light was perfect, the colours really vivid and, best of all, I had my Nikon D70s in my hands. Shot 10 frames off and was well pleased with the preview result.

When I got home I opened the pics up in Photoshop only to find that they had been shot in Nikon Fine jpg. I'd changed to jpg for some normal snapshot home pics.Still, they looked good so I chose the best one, applied a little sharpening and contrast, saved as best quality jpg and uploaded it after a final visual check. The pic on my computer was as sharp as a pin and I was well pleased with it. It also printed beautifully.

After upload I checked where the pic was in the queue and took a final look at it. To my horror the upload pic was garbage. It was fuzzy around the text on the balloon and generally looked horribly over compressed.

I normally shoot using Nikon RAW. My question is this.....when I upload a pic does it become further compressed during / as a result of, the upload process ?

I'm at work at the moment. When I get home I'll try to link to the pic to show what I mean.

[Will M]

Yes it does compress it a tiny bit when uploading but nothing major. what pixel width is the image ? and did you apply USM (unsharp mask) or did you use the "sharpen more" tool ?

[brianw999]

Image is 1024 wide by (about) 1500 high. Shot in portrait mode.

Sharpening was 2 passes of USM at 500, 0.2, 0.

As I say, post processing was fine on my monitor and it printed well.

It was only saved once after all processing was finished. I really cannot understand how this came to be as a JPG Fine image on a D70s starts life asquite a large image.

[brianw999]

Heres the image as saved on Imageshack.




I know that there is a bad halo around it but the uploaded image was far worse with severe blurring which looked like overcompression.

[RingwaySam]

Brian, did you save it in highest setting after your edit?

[JordanD]

It looks oversharpened IMO. Try making it a little smaller too (1043 px tall).

[Crism]

It does look weird, especially around the edges. I shoot in JPG all of the time with my 350D and I don't usually end up getting things like that. I noticed you use the 500/.2 USM. I've experimented with this and found that 50/.4 with about 2-3 passes seems to work the best before you resize it. Once you resize it, open the USM and play around with the top scroller since around 30-70 should make it sharper and clearer.

[brianw999]

OK guys, thanks for the help. I'll rework it from the original and see how it goes.

[JordanD]

If you want you can always post the original and ask someone to edit it. Althought it's not as satisfying as doing it yourself.