Question about picture quality.

[Mountain Fan]

I have been noticing that some of you have super clear images when you post them, even when they are reduced down to a smaller size.

I use photobucket, and when I reduce an image down to a usable size to post the image quality tends to go out the window.

Is it photobucket? Do you use other hosting? What's the trick?

[photo_chick]

I'd bet your problem is mainly using photobucket to resize. Try resizing then uploading and see if it helps.

[Mountain Fan]

OK, I think you are right. Here is a quick comparison.
Top pics was resized prior to putting on PB, bottom pics was put on PB then resized.
Bottom one looks a bit fuzzy and the detail lines don't seem as crisp, to me anyway.

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc22/MARPAT1/FtR21.jpg
http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc22/MARPAT1/FtR2.jpg

[seashoreCM]

Resize it yourself all in one move starting with the original picture from your camera and ending up with the desired Photobucket size (typically around 640x480). Of course, save the shrunk picture under a different name.

If you want to use only part of the picture (crop the picture), do the cropping using the original picture from the camera. Now resize this cropped picture once to get to the desired Photobucket size.

[photo_chick]

When you size an image down the software has to decide which pixels to take out. Photobucket isn't very good in that department. Facebook has the same kinds of problems. And when you add in the image optimization those sites do your quality goes down hill fast.