smugmug,sharpening and image resizing

[Ann McRae]

Previously, when I was using pbase my routine was to resize all images, sharpen and then upload.
One of my first delights with smugmug was that I did not need to resize or sharpen as the compression software used by the site did a wonderful job. (at least thats what I thought was going on).
Now, on occassion, I have problems with what I think are compression artifacts when using my normal routine - but it does not affect all images.
Todays image gave me this problem:
http://canadian-ann.smugmug.com/photos/14231369-M.jpg

Resizing and sharpening before posting eliminated the problem:
http://canadian-ann.smugmug.com/photos/14231625-M.jpg

You can look at them in the gallery:
http://canadian-ann.smugmug.com/gallery/340936

With some of my photos, the intent is to sell directly from smug, and I would like to have the originals there from which to print. How do I avoid this problem - any thoughts?

I use PSP 9 btw.

ann

[Baldy]

Hi Ann,

Beautiful shot. :D

Our intent with unsharp mask is to apply only the amount that brings the display copy back to the sharpness of the original. In other words, the display copies are downsampled, which causes them to lose some sharpness, so we experimented with different unsharp levels until the original and smaller copies looked like they had the same sharpness applied.

One reason for taking this approach is portraits tend to want to be softer than landscapes, etc. And different photographers have different tastes in unsharp levels.

So I tend to apply USM to my shots at ~60% for cars, maybe ~30% for people before uploading to smugmug.

In this shot, it looks like the most important thing is the second one has considerably more USM than the original you uploaded. It would be interesting to apply USM to the original before you upload it and see what the results are then.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,
Chris