Picture Formatting for Web and Print Applications
Why do so many digital photos look terrible?
You've seen it before–you're shopping for something online and the product photos are grainy, pixelated, or out of focus. Maybe you're looking at portraits in a printed brochure and the faces seem squished, stretched, or splotchy. What is the problem?
Some answers and an example
Image size: don't stretch your luck
Because this image has been stretched beyond its original size, artifacts appear as the computer interprets the missing information. Solution: size the photo to match the image container, not the other way around.
Right size, wrong format
This version is correctly sized but has been saved in the wrong format. The GIF format is generally not appropriate for photos because it fails to capture subtle color variations. The excessive compression omits too much picture data.
Properly-formatted and looking good!
Now we have a nice image! It has been compressed into a JPG format that results in a clear image with a small file size for quick page loading.