Image Degrading When Published

[Ninepatch]

I'm using CSB 4. I put up a single page photo essay using .jpg files that were scaled in Irfanview. They were shot at medium-resolution in my 1 mg Olympus and saved as a small file (19) at 72 dpi in Irfan. They looked fine in Irfan.

 

I imported them into CSB using a script that placed a small border around the image. Once published, the image is significantly darker and seems to have degraded.

 

I did another photo essay a few weeks ago from the same camera, same resolution, etc, etc. and it turned out just fine. In fact, I was scaling the images to the same settings in the second essay as the first specifically because it turned out so well.

 

I don't want to post a direct link here as the pages are about the US Presidential race and I respect that TCH is not the place for our personal political opinions. If someone could offer an opinion, though, I'd appreciate it.

 

I have published photos using the same procedures before with no problem, this has me baffled!

 

Thanks!

[Deverill]

I'm not a CSB user but in Fireworks if you set it to make an image darker by 10 and then later go into another image and select the brightness it will assume the same amount. Is there anything in CSB or Ifranview that could be remembering a previous modification and reapplying that to the new photo?

[TCH-Don]

Beth remember that jpeg images are compressed

and its not a good idea to modify them from the origial more than once to mantain the best quality.

CSB does alter the images to include them inside your .tlx file.

 

I resize and compress once and ftp them to an image folder,

then insert them in a page using the IMG tag

and you can use the border attribute at the same time.

 

Example:

<img src="/image/imagename.jpg" alt="alt name" width="300" height="225" border="2" />

You can get the height and width from Irfranview info button.

 

This way your .tlx file will be much smaller and the images will be as you originally modified them.

[Ninepatch]

Thank you Jim and Don for your response.

 

I really wish there were some decent documentation for Irfan - the only book that's available is in Dutch!

 

Jim -

 

What's frustrating is that I hadn't used Irfan between doing the two essays, so no settings were changed. The only difference between the two were the shooting conditions. The first was a brilliant, sunny day. The second was an overcast, grey day with spotty showers. I had to keep a fill-flash on all the time. I'm wondering if that played some part in this. When I went back and recreated a new set of scaled images and saved them at a higher quality setting of 50, they did fine after publishing.

 

Don -

 

I adjust and crop my images in the Olympus software first, then take a copy to Irfan for scaling and file-size reduction. I've been using the "Insert HTML" feature in CSB so that I can add a border. I load the file from that menu. Is this the same as what you're suggesting? Thanks much for your help!

 

Beth

[Ninepatch]

This is the script I'm using to insert an image with a colored and/or stylized border via the "Insert HTML" command in CSB (I learned it from Samantha):

 

<img src="^GEMDIR/CrowdShot.jpg" border=3 style="border-color=#6600CC; border-style:inset" >

 

There is an option for "Files Associated With...." that I use to load the .jpg.

[TCH-Bruce]

Hi Beth,

 

You are going to get that type of degradation using multiple software to manipulate the images. I would suggest as Don mentioned to put your images into another folder and access them with the "IMG" tag in the HTML.

 

Paint Shop Pro comes with borders that you can apply to images as well as being a full blown image editor. There is another software that I've used in the past that allows you to be creative with images adding borders, vignettes and a host of other things called Professor Franklin. This program also has the ability to compress images without losing to much quality.

 

http://www.swsoftware.com/PF_Products/photo-editor.htm

[Deverill]

Just to fill in a bit, the reason JPG images degrade when sent through multiple programs is that JPG is called a "lossy" file format. The reason it is so much smaller than BMP is that it doesn't save every pixel. It fudges a bit and if one pixel is "close enough" to its neighbor then when it is saved the program throws away the info on one of the pixels.

 

If you have an original image and make a bunch of changes to it and save it once then it's all good. If you make a change and save it (lost some info) and then make another change with a different program and save it (lost some more) and then use the final program to load it (lost even more) then you have a terrible image in the end. In fact, Fireworks from Macromedia doesn't even like saving in JPG. You can make it do it, of course, but it much prefers to save images in PNG which loses nothing in the process.

 

Hope it helps anyone wondering what everyone was talking about image degradation.

[Ninepatch]

Thank you all for the great input - I have lots to play with now. I'm in the process of completely redoing my website, but with it being the height of summer in the garden and the kick-off to the serious election season, I'm a little plowed under.

[Deverill]

I get it - garden... plowed... pretty funny.