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Resizing and sharpening + watermarking
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.
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.
0
Comments
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
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.
Smug since 2006
SmugMug Help
PhotoscapeDesign
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
Oh, and gigity gigity gigity Allll riiight.
Richard
Good, another vote for custom watermarking. Still no response from the actual 'Smug' people? Where are you guys?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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-
My SmugMug Portfolio • My Astro-Landscape Photo Blog • Dgrin Weddings Forum
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
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-
My SmugMug Portfolio • My Astro-Landscape Photo Blog • Dgrin Weddings Forum
-Matt-
My SmugMug Portfolio • My Astro-Landscape Photo Blog • Dgrin Weddings Forum
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/