How to fix grainey images?

I am building a website for a my mom who is an artist. First draft of her website is complete. The personal picture of her on the about me page and the paintings on her portfolio page all look rather grainey in the browser. The Painting pictures were emailed to me, they are higher resolution and look sharp in Preview. Any advice on preserving the sharpness? Thanks so much

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Sometime around 2/9/08 (at 21:17 -0400) Waylen said:

Any advice on preserving the sharpness?

Could you perhaps post a link to an example page?

k

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Freeway has a sharpen action and I think a while ago Heather said she uses 3-6 on those, but I think then they are too sharpened. What are you outputting or importing them as?

That’ll be a tall tale sign of your situation.

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The images are all jpegs, the temporary sub domain host for the site is http://www.sashapepper.rss101.org. The bio picture might be a so-so quality image, but the paintings are sharper resolution jpegs. Is there a way to make them import as they look in Preview? I tried the sharpen action and it didn’t work out so good. Any feedback would be awesome! Thanks :)

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The images are combining with the graphics behind them and becoming GIFs, take a look here:

http://www.sashapepper.rss101.org/Resources/sidepic-frame1.gif

To stop this from happening select the image and in the Inspector palette uncheck the Combine Graphics option. Or, even better, make the black item behind it an HTML item, there’s really no need to make the image larger by using another graphic just to have a black area on the page.

Hope this helps.

Joe

On 4 Sep 2008, at 06:40, Waylen wrote:

The images are all jpegs, the temporary sub domain host for the site is http://www.sashapepper.rss101.org. The bio picture might be a so- so quality image, but the paintings are sharper resolution jpegs. Is there a way to make them import as they look in Preview? I tried the sharpen action and it didn’t work out so good. Any feedback would be awesome! Thanks :)

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Sometime around 4/9/08 (at 01:40 -0400) Waylen said:

the paintings are sharper resolution jpegs.

Actually - no they aren’t. They’re GIFs. :-)

Here’s something that’s rather useful to understand about Freeway. You can import almost any kind of bitmap image, including TIFF and native Photoshop (PSD). You don’t have to prepare your images as web-ready JPEGs or GIFs first.

This is because Freeway will, as part of the publishing process, generate web-optimised JPEGs and GIFs (and PNGs if you specify) automatically, from whatever graphics you have in your pages.

Whatever image you import, the published output will be what Freeway thinks it should be - unless of course you step in and tell it explicitly which format to use.

And THIS is what’s happening here. You’ve imported images into your layout. Freeway is generating web-optimised images from that layout. BUT it is generating them as GIFs - hence the ‘graininess’ of the end results! (The GIF format can use a maximum of 256 colours, which is not a lot when dealing with lots of subtle hue and tonal shifts. Seurat-style dithering is what’s normally applied to simulate in-between colours.)

Now here’s what I suggest:

Delete the black panel and images. Start again with these.

With a blank area, draw graphic boxes and import your painting images. Freeway should automatically choose to output them as JPEGs, but select one and check in the Inspector palette, third button along the top. JPEG or GIF? If it is GIF, switch it to JPEG.

Once you have your images arranged, draw a black HTML box - NOT a graphic box - to fill in the area you want to be black, and send it to the back.

How’s it going so far?

k

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On 4 Sep 2008, at 06:40, Waylen wrote:

The bio picture might be a so-so quality image, but the paintings are sharper resolution jpegs. Is there a way to make them import as they look in Preview? I tried the sharpen action and it didn’t work out so good. Any feedback would be awesome!

The bio picture has been output as a GIF, so it’s going to look a bit scratchy; JPEG is the way to go for continuous-tone pictures.

best wishes,

Paul Bradforth

http://www.paulbradforth.com

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Thanks everyone for the image help. I changed the graphic black backgrounds to html, and got the images back to jpeg. Looking much better. Thanks again!

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