PP skills and effect on final image. (1 Viewer)

Hi all,
I hope I've posted this in the right subforum. Mod, please move this post if necessary.
Being a novice both in shooting and PP skills, I am wondering if excellent PP skills is a must to produce a high quality jpeg image on a website most of which have file size limitations.
I've noticed my images suffer much degradation on posting although I know I have a decent raw file to start with. Prior to resizing for the web, the jpeg file after conversion from raw shows a fair bit of detail but most of it is lost on resizing. Is there a technique to retain more detail? Thanks for any tips.

Hello Jack,

could you quickly explain your current workflow?

It should certainly be possible to create very high quality jpegs for web use without any particular post processing skills being necessary, so it's likely that you just need to tweak some specific part of your workflow.

It'll help to know the RAW conversion and PP software you're using, too.

Keith Reeder said:

Hello Jack,

could you quickly explain your current workflow?

It should certainly be possible to create very high quality jpegs for web use without any particular post processing skills being necessary, so it's likely that you just need to tweak some specific part of your workflow.

It'll help to know the RAW conversion and PP software you're using, too.

Click to expand...

I normally use DPP. First thing (on RAW tab) I do is crop and then apply some brightness correction to the exposure followed by various amounts of adjustments to 'contrast, highlight,shadow, colour tone and saturation'. Occassionally, I might change 'picture style' to what appeals to me, and then use unsharp mask to sharpen. I may or may not use the next tab (RGB) for further tweaking.
If noise reduction is not needed, I 'convert and save' as TIFF and/or Jpeg.
If noise reduction is needed, I open up Neat Image to do that and finally save as Jpeg. The last step is resizing with Irfanview and the image is small enough to post on most websites. Btw, the file size prior to resizing is typically 10meg or thereabouts and then Irfanview resizes it to around 300 to 400Kb.

Which Irfanview resizing algorithm do you use, Jack?

And how do you set the new size?

The attached is a typical image of mine, resized in Irfanview from a tiff (converted in Capture One 6), and it looks OK to me.

Could you post an example of a problem image, please?

Thanks Keith for the feedback.
Having looked at your attachments, nice pic btw, I reckon I do the same as shown by you. I frequently choose 800X600 which gets the image size down to acceptable limits of websites. I would like to send a sample RAW image but I guess it wouldn't work here as I shoot with a 7D and a typical file is 5184x3456 pixels. But I can attach a PP'ed image here which has suffered some degradation. The original has far more detail on the bird's back.