I have been researching this night and day for months now. Photos viewed on my website look terrible compared to the same file viewed with other mediums. I have contacted many website support specialists (many of who can not even view a difference between the photos) with out any luck of fixing this problem. I am starting to think it takes a photographers eye to see the difference.
I am a artist / photographer and I use my website through WordPress to display my work. I typically resize my photos to max 600 w/h and save as high quality JPEG in Photoshop. When I view them on my website the contrast, sharpness, and vibrancy is lost. I have toggled between seeing the same photo off the web, in a blank web browser window, on social networking platforms such as Facebook, and using Windows Picture Viewer. There is a drastic difference when viewing the same photo on my WordPress website vs. having it just in a browser. Sadly, my website is where I would like them viewed in their native quality. The website takes my photos and makes them look like point and shoot snap shots, and its starting to make my blood boil because I can not get to the root of this problem.
I have tried saving the photo in every possible format (.png, .tiff, .gif, etc.) and uploading them. They're always the same when viewed on my website
My roommate is a web programmer and he can not understand it himself. His explanation is that the browsers are making the photos lighter. This does not agree with me because when I view the photos right off the server in a browser they're pretty close to perfect. But then they are viewed through my website they look terrible.
I realized that there is one difference between seeing them on my website and seeing them off my server, the WordPress gallery program.
- Step 1. I upload the files to my server via FTP
- Step 2. I then go into word press and import the photos using nextgen.
- Step 3. I then insert the code on a post in my website allowing the images to be seen.
Its not the fact that they are online that is distorting them its that they go through this secondary uploading type process.
This is driving me mad. The only time I can view them perfectly off my website is when I use the change the options in the gallery and change the JavaScript Thumbnail effect to highslide. but then they are opening up to just a browser window and not being viewed on my website. At that point I'm not entirely sure where that script is showing the image from. My server or NextGEN.
If some of this does not make sense I apologize, I am not that literate in this dept and only know what I have been able to teach myself.
Here is a series JPEG of the screen shots from each viewing platform. The website (top photo) is of the poorest quality. Facebook (the middle) is close to the original (the bottom) photo. You can see a clear difference in the saturation and contrast.