Resizing and sharpening + watermarking

quagmire321 · July 4, 2005

Yup, this has probably been asked a thousand times or more. But the bugs & features request seemed to be way too long so I decided to post new message.

First of all, Smugmug is currently working pretty well for me and have just landed my a couple of assignments from people that looked at my site. There are still a couple of things that bother me a lot regarding Smugmug:

1) Resizing & sharpening - I am sure I am not the first person that dislikes the high compression ratio used when Smugmug resizes the original to produce the small, medium & large files. It introduces a lot of artifacts and does not allow me to show my work at its best.

2) Watermarking - I really would like custom watermarking. The current watermark is way too intrusive.

3) Allow us to customize the main page more - I mean by the first page of our gallery, maybe a few fixed 'styles' might work for this.

4) Titles, titles - Allow custom titles for EACH gallery, makes it more obvious what is what on search engine results.

Thanks.

grannyrobin · July 4, 2005

quagmire321 wrote:

Yup, this has probably been asked a thousand times or more. But the bugs & features request seemed to be way too long so I decided to post new message.

First of all, Smugmug is currently working pretty well for me and have just landed my a couple of assignments from people that looked at my site. There are still a couple of things that bother me a lot regarding Smugmug:

1) Resizing & sharpening - I am sure I am not the first person that dislikes the high compression ratio used when Smugmug resizes the original to produce the small, medium & large files. It introduces a lot of artifacts and does not allow me to show my work at its best.

2) Watermarking - I really would like custom watermarking. The current watermark is way too intrusive.

3) Allow us to customize the main page more - I mean by the first page of our gallery, maybe a few fixed 'styles' might work for this.

4) Titles, titles - Allow custom titles for EACH gallery, makes it more obvious what is what on search engine results.

Thanks.

Here's the link that describes how smugmug decided how much to sharpen.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2719

In addition, awhile back Baldy mentioned a couple of other things that may be of interest to you... they go to how your images appear at smugmug.

One is the color space "thing"...http://www.smugmug.com/help/srgb-versus-adobe-rgb-1998

Here's further info on display quality. http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-quality

Maybe this will help?
-Robin

quagmire321 · July 4, 2005

grannyrobin wrote:

Here's the link that describes how smugmug decided how much to sharpen.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=2719

In addition, awhile back Baldy mentioned a couple of other things that may be of interest to you... they go to how your images appear at smugmug.

One is the color space "thing"...http://www.smugmug.com/help/srgb-versus-adobe-rgb-1998

Here's further info on display quality. http://www.smugmug.com/help/display-quality

Maybe this will help?
-Robin

Robin,

Thanks you for the links but I still find the sharpening to be way too high. Maybe my original shots were too sharp!

Would really like an option to turn it off for certain galleries, at least for Pro accounts, I guess. I think most Pros can live with sharpening the shots themselves when the need to.

BTW, the custom watermarking would REALLY be very, very useful to many ppl.

Barb · July 4, 2005

quagmire321 wrote:

BTW, the custom watermarking would REALLY be very, very useful to many ppl.

Custom watermarking has been discussed quite a bit, most recently here. I, like you and many others, would love to see this implemented. I personally don't use the current watermarking, as I think it is just too obtrusive.

grannyrobin · July 4, 2005

quagmire321 wrote:

Robin,

Thanks you for the links but I still find the sharpening to be way too high. Maybe my original shots were too sharp!

Would really like an option to turn it off for certain galleries, at least for Pro accounts, I guess. I think most Pros can live with sharpening the shots themselves when the need to.

BTW, the custom watermarking would REALLY be very, very useful to many ppl.

The sad truth is that I know pretty much zero about any of this stuff... except where to find little bits of smugmug info. However, one of the great things about this forum is that there is no shortage of experienced people willing to offer constructive criticism on one's shots. I love to go to the section called "shots" and look at the various photos. I comment, too. Never on technical aspects of the shots though... My grandchildren love the shots, too.

There's one more section about display quality that I can send you a link to. It's on a smugblog. http://blogs.smugmug.com/great-prints/

And now I'm on my way. The search is on. Maybe I'll be able to learn why it is that smugmug offers only one option for watermarks. Maybe not... that's part of the fun of searching.
-Robin

marlinspike · July 4, 2005

Quagmire, the sharpening doesn't get applied to prints, just to what people see on the screen because when you downsize an image for viewing on the net you have to sharpen it to make it look like how it will print. I would kill for the custom watermarking. I don't think I've ever posted a watermarked photo anywhere without the first comment being "Your watermark is too intrusive" I thought it was growing on me, but it didn't.
Oh, and gigity gigity gigity Allll riiight.
Richard

quagmire321 · July 5, 2005

Well, I can understand the need to do sharpening but sharpening that even causes halos? That is way too much, the halos are often noticeable at Medium and I can see them clearly on any sharp edges on Large. And I have already had 3 potential clients asking me why my shots had 'jaggies' on them... not good. :hung

Good, another vote for custom watermarking. Still no response from the actual 'Smug' people? Where are you guys?

Baldy · July 5, 2005

quagmire321 wrote:

Well, I can understand the need to do sharpening but sharpening that even causes halos? That is way too much, the halos are often noticeable at Medium and I can see them clearly on any sharp edges on Large. And I have already had 3 potential clients asking me why my shots had 'jaggies' on them... not good. :hung

Good, another vote for custom watermarking. Still no response from the actual 'Smug' people? Where are you guys?

Quaqmire, can you point us to the offensive photos? We'd like to take a look and see what's up. It's hard to understand how 20% unsharp mask causes halos.

Unsharp is a significant reason for print returns but it's always from too little and not too much. It only takes a single focus group with consumers to see that sharpness is the #1 way they judge a print. They're used to the sharpness consumer labs apply with their autocorrect (usually about 50%) or that we apply with our autocorrect (40%). They'll sometimes return a $400 wedding print order with perfect colors because "the printer was out of focus" and comment that the prints they get from their local drugstore don't have as good of color but at least their printers are sharp.

We'd love to get custom watermarking out the door too but the current job we're immersed in is more powerful/easier customization, quite a huge undertaking.

Thanks,
Baldy

onethumb · July 5, 2005

Baldy wrote:

Quaqmire, can you point us to the offensive photos? We'd like to take a look and see what's up. It's hard to understand how 20% unsharp mask causes halos.

Unsharp is a significant reason for print returns but it's always from too little and not too much. It only takes a single focus group with consumers to see that sharpness is the #1 way they judge a print. They're used to the sharpness consumer labs apply with their autocorrect (usually about 50%) or that we apply with our autocorrect (40%). They'll sometimes return a $400 wedding print order with perfect colors because "the printer was out of focus" and comment that the prints they get from their local drugstore don't have as good of color but at least their printers are sharp.

We'd love to get custom watermarking out the door too but the current job we're immersed in is more powerful/easier customization, quite a huge undertaking.

Thanks,
Baldy

Far more likely that the JPEG compression is causing the halos, not the sharpening.

Don

dashphotography · July 5, 2005

I've posted about the halos as well way back when.
I agree I don't think it is the sharpening alone. It is the save for web compression that smugmug is using. I've had halos over hockey helmets before and have posted about this in the past.

I believe it is the combination of the two that is causing it....and yes probably more so the default compression applied during the auto created downsampled images.

I have been told the reason they use the higher compression is because it relates to the size of the images and speed......realative to the average smugmug user.....relative to the way they connect to the internet...etc. Speed VS. Quailty/bandwith issue. Not one you or I are going to win unfortunately.

I too wish the Pro Account could select this on, off, or the level they want their samples compressed and sharpened.

Baldy · July 5, 2005

dashphotography wrote:

I've had halos over hockey helmets before and have posted about this in the past.

Here's that thread:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=5366

As I recall, most people couldn't see the halos, even people on this forum with very fine eyes and good monitors, but everyone who browses the site notices the speed on every page they click.

quagmire321 · July 5, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Far more likely that the JPEG compression is causing the halos, not the sharpening.

Don

Dear boss-man,

Yup, seems to make sense; not sharpening but compression or a combination of both. I do not know... and to risk sounding like a whinny little customer, can you just FIX it?

Here is a sample :

At the first glance, everything seem nice and awfully sharp... but many people that I spoke to noticed something 'wrong'. And when I looked closely, there were halos everywhere, the walls, around the trishaw 'drivers', on the sky.

Sample #2:

And yes, some of my customers are 'pixel-peepers'; you see, I have got some fellas always looking for a reason not to use me but instead someone else (friend, relative, spouse... whatever) for their photography.

I would DEARLY like to display my shots on LARGE size on my gallery as well But I did not do so becoz I cannot watermark the image unobstrusively easily since I am using Smugmug as my tertiary backup of my originals AND those 'halos' are much more prominent in LARGE than it is in MEDIUM as shown here.

To summarize, I have 2 major complaints from my customers/potentials:
1) Your photos look too small (I am still using MEDIUM for all display galleries save one, trying to circumvent by having a seperate 'for show only' gallery)
2) What? You shots have "jaggies"? Looks like you are using digitial, I have got a 8MP Canon...Sony...Nikon, etc too. I will contact you later.

Of course, when no (2) happens... they rarely call back. :cry

Competition is stiff over my stretch of the woods or maybe I am just not good enuf...

Sorry for the long rant.

delenca · August 1, 2005

I agree
I agree. I am testing out smugmug and I am disapointed with the quality of the resized images generated by smugmug. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be much we can do in terms of changing our workflow. An alternative is to upload your own resized pictures at 600 x 400 with the desired amount of USM. In that case, smugmug won't try to generate the medium or large thumnails and will just show your 600 x 400 uploaded image as the "medium" picture, without processing (I believe). The disadvantage, of course, is that the viewers won't be able to see the original image, and the 600 x 400 is probably not a good source picture for printing directly through the smugmug interface. Am I missing any other alternative?

-Alex

quagmire321 wrote:

Dear boss-man,

Yup, seems to make sense; not sharpening but compression or a combination of both. I do not know... and to risk sounding like a whinny little customer, can you just FIX it?

At the first glance, everything seem nice and awfully sharp... but many people that I spoke to noticed something 'wrong'. And when I looked closely, there were halos everywhere, the walls, around the trishaw 'drivers', on the sky.

And yes, some of my customers are 'pixel-peepers'; you see, I have got some fellas always looking for a reason not to use me but instead someone else (friend, relative, spouse... whatever) for their photography.

I would DEARLY like to display my shots on LARGE size on my gallery as well But I did not do so becoz I cannot watermark the image unobstrusively easily since I am using Smugmug as my tertiary backup of my originals AND those 'halos' are much more prominent in LARGE than it is in MEDIUM as shown here.

To summarize, I have 2 major complaints from my customers/potentials:
1) Your photos look too small (I am still using MEDIUM for all display galleries save one, trying to circumvent by having a seperate 'for show only' gallery)
2) What? You shots have "jaggies"? Looks like you are using digitial, I have got a 8MP Canon...Sony...Nikon, etc too. I will contact you later.

Of course, when no (2) happens... they rarely call back. :cry

Competition is stiff over my stretch of the woods or maybe I am just not good enuf...

Sorry for the long rant.

mlougee · August 1, 2005

On the issue about watermarking... pre-Smug solutions?
Although no one has commented on the desire for Smug to provide customized watermarks for a while...

If this can be done by SM itself, it can certainly be done before images are uploaded to Smug, although this adds a step to the workflow process before uploading to Smug.

Do people have favorite applications/procedures to add watermarks? Does it make sense to do this before uploading? One random thought is whether the time/datestamp of the image could easily become the watermark, which would add some useful information to the image?

marlinspike · August 1, 2005

Sure you could watermark before uploading, but then when somebody buys a print it will print out with the watermark on it.

limbik · August 2, 2005

I was about to pull the trigger on a pro account, assuming the watermark could be custom, but after finding out it cannot be, I will be waiting for this before I even sign up for the trial, it is THAT big of an issue.

quagmire321 · August 4, 2005

I guess I am being ignored as it looks like nitpicking... tiny halos to some.

Anyway, I am working around that right now; all my latest galleries I resize them to a maximum of 800px wide or tall and then post a message so that any visitors to my site view them as "Large" instead of the normal "Medium" size. Smugmug doesn't seem to touch images that are smaller than or equal to 800px on the widest side.

Maybe you guys can do the same for your accounts.

Matthew Saville · August 4, 2005

quagmire321 wrote:

I guess I am being ignored as it looks like nitpicking... tiny halos to some.

Anyway, I am working around that right now; all my latest galleries I resize them to a maximum of 800px wide or tall and then post a message so that any visitors to my site view them as "Large" instead of the normal "Medium" size. Smugmug doesn't seem to touch images that are smaller than or equal to 800px on the widest side.

Maybe you guys can do the same for your accounts.

Time to hire a web designer to make my own website, methinks? When you browse a website made for the likes of Tony Sweet or Jim Natchwey, you sort of begin to firstly, realize that good images speak for themselves, and SELL themselves, no matter the website layout / jpg quality etc. etc... Secondly, you begin to wonder if you're asking too much of a massive, millions-of-pictures-hosted web service provider for just $100 a year...

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe smugmug is about to roll out a bunch of things like custom watermarking, jpeg quality 12 thumbs, etc. etc.

But seriously folks, there's just so many things on the table right now. I'd like panoramic prints, the ability to sell matted / framed prints, true B&W prints, metallic prints, custom watermarking, higher quality thumbs, my own fully customized front page, the ability to play music in the background, a "tip" jar, and on and on and on... Well, if I really and truly want that then maybe I should hire my own web designer. But for now, I don't even think my photos are good enough to be worthy of all the cool features I desire, so I'll just concentrate on that first. Okay, off my soap box now lol...

Just FYI, whoever is in charge of this, I think it would be worth the hastle to experiment with USM at a tiny radius and a high power. This works great for my thumbnails, and never gives an "over sharpened" look. Try a radius of 0.2 or 0.3, at 200-400 power... That small bit of advice aside, I am in the group of people who think that the JPEG quality is the one to blame for most of the drabbier looking images.. Would it kill to change from a JPEG quality 5 to say, an 8 or so, for the L and M images?

smugmug's Small version of a huge image in my portfolio.

The Original JPG that I saved in PS at jpeg level 5 or so

The Original JPG that I saved in PS at jpeg level 8-10, I forget which.

The file size does about double, but it's just 30 K and 60 K, for the Small image. This to me would be acceptable, considering the possibility for very noticeable artifacting such as in this specific photo. I've posted this test before...

Anyway I'm sure smugmug has done what is in the best interest for the mass of their users, and I applaud them for that. My way around it might have to be to simply upload all my own 800 pixel files and make them non printable, and then guide the user to use paypal or something in order to purchase a print which I'll then order from an invisible gallery where my high-res files reside. That doesn't sound too bad, if anyone can teach me how to script a paypal setup into my smugmug...

Take care all,
-Matt-

limbik · August 5, 2005

Matt, I hope they can implement a way to do it as you have demonstrated, I can really see the halos in the first pic. That would be so amazing if they were able to do panoramic prints, especially for you! Nice photos btw.
I have a fairly informal wedding to shoot soon, and I was hoping to use smugmug pro for the print sales, but I doubt I'll see custom watermarks before then. If I at least knew they were seriously working on these things, I would probably jump on board and hope they roll it out sooner rather than later.

-James

Matthew Saville · August 6, 2005

limbik wrote:

Matt, I hope they can implement a way to do it as you have demonstrated, I can really see the halos in the first pic. That would be so amazing if they were able to do panoramic prints, especially for you! Nice photos btw.
I have a fairly informal wedding to shoot soon, and I was hoping to use smugmug pro for the print sales, but I doubt I'll see custom watermarks before then. If I at least knew they were seriously working on these things, I would probably jump on board and hope they roll it out sooner rather than later.

-James

For weddings, James, I can reccomend this: Simply make one gallery with the high resolution / large print photos, and set it to elegant/journal with Original / Large viewing disabled. You can let smugmug watermark the remaining Medium / Small files, but I opt not to usually, since they're such small images. A better tactic might be to disable right-clicking, I'd say that would be the best combination of not hindering people's viewing experience but letting them know that they're not allowed to steal the JPG's...

Then, and I know this is a tad of work but, create a secondary gallery with 700 pixel wide / tall images in it, which you have resized, USMed, and watermarked yourself. Disable prints for this gallery and allow Large / Original viewing, and set it to slide show. Post a link to THIS gallery in the description of the main print-able gallery, saying "click to view larger photos as a slide show" or something. Sound good? Or, you can simply set the gallery style to viewer controlled and then link them to the gallery as a slide show initially, via the link trick that you can find in a recent post somewhere around here.

Good luck with the wedding!
-Matt-

limbik · August 7, 2005

Thanks for the tips! I'm not sweating it too much, luckily its very informal and a great opportunity for me to hone my skills.

Matthew Saville · August 7, 2005

limbik wrote:

Thanks for the tips! I'm not sweating it too much, luckily its very informal and a great opportunity for me to hone my skills.

An informal wedding is the best place to learn! I saw a guy once post his first, shoot-for-a-friend wedding photos, and some people totally chewed him out saying that his images were bad, so why post them? I think that here in the Dgrin group, we're sane enough to realize that posting in a forum is a means for feedback and improvement, so please post some from the shoot! We'd love to give a few pointers. Like I said, an informal wedding is the best place to learn...

-Matt-

Baldy · August 8, 2005

Matthew Saville wrote:

The file size does about double, but it's just 30 K and 60 K, for the Small image.

Yes, unfortunately, we get roundly punished daily for speed since our image size is already larger than anyone but ImageEvent. If we doubled image size we'd get even more killed in the forums than we do now.

I tell you what'd be great, however: adaptive JPEG levels. We all think in terms of JPEG quality X but the examples we produce are usually ones with broad areas of continuous color, like sky. It's the border of a high-contrast edge with a solid color like blue that's trouble.

But as it turns out, those images compress well anyway so we could afford to go up in size for them. It's the images of fields of grass that explode in size because the JPEG algorithm doesn't work as well, and artifacts are less visible.

So what would be good is to save images that compress well (broad areas of solid color) at a different setting than ones that don't. Anyone know how to accomplish this?

We've created a bit of a monster by not touching the large images because many people are saving them at a high JPEG number to clear up every last artifact and not looking at the image size. Modem users land on their galleries and flame that they'll never click on another smugmug link because our site is like running into a wall. I look at the image size and find out it takes longer than a minute for them to see one image.

mlougee · August 8, 2005

Just as a single comparison, when viewing "review" images on www.dpreview.com, the message:

Original: img_0241.jpg, 1374KB (Warning: LARGE FILE)

is shown before a person tries to view their "original."

Could SM display such a "warning" for large files?

Similarly, when a SM member uploads a file, could SM do a dynamic, live jpg compression, and when the compression still yielded a huge file, perhaps you could warn the member with something like "Notice that these compressed jpg's are still large, making your viewers wait for large files to download... Would you like to use a greater jpg compression?"

At a minimum, perhaps you could display the filesizes (as does dpreview), so the viewer has a clue about the relative download times to view the pics.

pengrus · August 8, 2005

quagmire321 wrote:

I guess I am being ignored as it looks like nitpicking... tiny halos to some.

Anyway, I am working around that right now; all my latest galleries I resize them to a maximum of 800px wide or tall and then post a message so that any visitors to my site view them as "Large" instead of the normal "Medium" size. Smugmug doesn't seem to touch images that are smaller than or equal to 800px on the widest side.

Maybe you guys can do the same for your accounts.

If this is the case, then smugmug loses its appeal. The major selling point of smugmug is the ability to easily sell and prints logistics. If the customers cannot order directly because we had to upload a 800px picture to avoid quality loss, why don't we go to pbase?

After reading the posts and experimenting myself, I feel the sharpening is not really an issue anymore because smugmug team has set it so that it applies minimum sharpenning to bring it close to original. Most of the images that I saw here have poor edges should be caused by the quality loss of poor compression. We can cope with sharpness setting, but we cannot cope with the poor compression.

kwalsh · August 9, 2005

Baldy wrote:

I tell you what'd be great, however: adaptive JPEG levels. We all think in terms of JPEG quality X but the examples we produce are usually ones with broad areas of continuous color, like sky. It's the border of a high-contrast edge with a solid color like blue that's trouble.

But as it turns out, those images compress well anyway so we could afford to go up in size for them. It's the images of fields of grass that explode in size because the JPEG algorithm doesn't work as well, and artifacts are less visible.

So what would be good is to save images that compress well (broad areas of solid color) at a different setting than ones that don't. Anyone know how to accomplish this?

So it appears that most digital cameras do exactly this - even my ancient Sony S85. At its "High" setting it targets about a 1.1MB file size, and "Medium" about 850KB. After taking many many scenes all at the same setting the file sizes are remarkably consistent. Examining the quantization tables in each JPEG shows that sure enough, they are different. The camera is tailoring the compression based on the scene content to achive a consistent file size.

A quick search on google shows that there are some software programs out there that do exactly this, but most of the are GUI type things. I'm not sure what you guys use on your back end. One could imagine a pretty simple script that uses something like ImageMagick's convert (or whatever you're using now) to generate at the default setting, check the file size and try at a lower compression ratio if the file is small. With some trial and error I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to come up with thresholds that result in the vast majority of images just using your default settings and the remainder getting done on the second try by setting the quality/compression setting based on the file size of the default.

And yes, I think it would help a whole lot.

Mike Lane · August 11, 2005

Baldy wrote:

Yes, unfortunately, we get roundly punished daily for speed since our image size is already larger than anyone but ImageEvent. If we doubled image size we'd get even more killed in the forums than we do now.

I tell you what'd be great, however: adaptive JPEG levels. We all think in terms of JPEG quality X but the examples we produce are usually ones with broad areas of continuous color, like sky. It's the border of a high-contrast edge with a solid color like blue that's trouble.

But as it turns out, those images compress well anyway so we could afford to go up in size for them. It's the images of fields of grass that explode in size because the JPEG algorithm doesn't work as well, and artifacts are less visible.

So what would be good is to save images that compress well (broad areas of solid color) at a different setting than ones that don't. Anyone know how to accomplish this?

We've created a bit of a monster by not touching the large images because many people are saving them at a high JPEG number to clear up every last artifact and not looking at the image size. Modem users land on their galleries and flame that they'll never click on another smugmug link because our site is like running into a wall. I look at the image size and find out it takes longer than a minute for them to see one image.

I posted this in another thread, but I thought it may be worth mentioning here. I may be way off base though.

I was thinking maybe you could somehow use the base image to do this by determining how much they could compress a given image with a set amount of jpg compression. Assuming that jpgs compress differently and those that would compress only a little would tend to be those that would stand up to a higher compression ratio and vice versa. Of course you would have to take into account the size of the original and the overhead that you get with a jpg but that shouldn't be difficult. Of course I suppose you could have an image of half grass and half sky, but I would think that it would still mostly work...maybe.

Resizing and sharpening + watermarking

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