loosing qulity during conversion (1 Viewer)

taking RAW files on my 1DMkIIN I am converting using RAWshooter premium to a general size of 700 pix wide for my web site---after cropping and a few alterations, sharpness, fill light etc I tend to convert at 300dpi and high JPeg quality which produces a file size of about 30kb to 90kb---although they look good on the monitor and I tend not to resize anything upwards, more usually downwards, when they go on the web many tend to look rather soft and far less sharp than they appear before conversion--appreciating that there is some reduction in quality to JPeg other shots on the web seem to maintain more sharpness---
am I doing something wrong somewhere?

Graham Catley

Graham might be worth checking that the files that appear on your web site are exactly the same as the ones you've uploaded? Try a download and compare with original.

Some tricks employed :
do a sharpen before resize down;
choose resizing algorithm eg. binlinear may preserve sharpness better than bicubic;
sharpen after resize (being careful about aliasing/jaggies);
choice of sharpening algorithm : maybe use a sharpener which employs deconvolution instead of USM. Focus Fixer or Focus Magic are candidates as possibly are some of the sharpeners which have appeared in more recent versions of Photoshop;
choose degree of jpeg compression; Ulead Smart Save and Xat Image Optimiser, for example, allow precise setting of jpeg compression settings intereactively.

I believe BreezeBrowser has some useful options for downsizing with sharpening which work well.
Any chance you could provide an example of a downsize which you find disappointing?

I agree with normjackson, you definitely should do a sharpen operation after resampling an image to a smaller size. It throws pixels away in the operation, and this almost always seems to result in a slight softening of an image.

interesting----I do all the sharpening, re-sizing etc in RAWshooter and to be fair print quality always looks fine it seems to be reduction of image quality to a suitable web size which seems to cause the problems---doing a two stage reduction in RAWshooter then sharpen in Photoshop takes more time of course and in theory sounds to be unnecessary

graham catley said:

interesting----I do all the sharpening, re-sizing etc in RAWshooter and to be fair print quality always looks fine it seems to be reduction of image quality to a suitable web size which seems to cause the problems---doing a two stage reduction in RAWshooter then sharpen in Photoshop takes more time of course and in theory sounds to be unnecessary

Click to expand...

Not exactly sure what you mean. You normally wouldn't resize an image to print it. Do you mean you are enlarging it for printing via resampling? In other words making the dimensions larger by resampling the image UP because it is too small out of the camera to be printed in the size you want? If so, I have found that indeed the sharpness does not suffer as much in upsizing as it does in downsizing. Although you certainly loose quality when you up-size something and it should be avoided when possible.

I notice you say you use 300 dpi. You really only need 200 dpi for inkjet printing, so perhaps you are enlarging your images unnecessarily. To determine, just divide the dimensions by 200 and that gives you the max size in inches that you should print at (e.g. a 2000 x 1000 pixel image can print at 10 inches by 5 inches).