Sharpening
Since yesterday we have been giving newly uploaded photos a light sharpening. This only applies to the “standard” and “large” formats, i.e. the single-page photo format and the large format that is displayed when you click on the photo.
A lot of users have been asking for this sharpen, but please comment here if you don’t like this, or if you would rather have an unsharp masking instead.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Please don’t sharpen the photos that I upload. Please don’t do that. I want to decide for myself how sharp or unsharp my photos are. I want to apply sharpening myself to my photos if it is necessary.
If I sharpen and then you sharpen, the result is likely to be oversharpening, which is ugly.
Please don’t sharpen my photos. Please.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
I don’t get it. Is it because sharpened photos looks better in standard and large format?
I haven’t uploaded my photo for a few weeks (just extremely lazy lol), and I dunno the effect on this new sharpen process yet. But I think things are better the way they are
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Your doing this automatically for everyone? I think that’s a mistake as people need to have control over their photos. Make it an opt-in preference and nobody can complain…
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
sharpening can be especially bad on photos which have been upsized, or have some more JPEG compression. If such photos get sharpened, it’s bad.
On other photos, as claimed before, it might not be in the interest of the user.
that for, i also would suggest to let the user choose in the settings if this should be done to his/her images
btw.: In my own photo-processing, I also often add a slight sharpening to my photos for web, after downsizing them (because default downsizing algorithms still make it a bit more blurry, especially up to photoshop7, interpolation issue). but i know on some photos i won’T do the sharpening, as it looks worse.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
First of all, the “upsizing” problem has been fixed. Photos smaller than our standard sizes are no longer upsized, and these photos are not sharpened. We only sharpen photos that are resized exactly because they tend to look blurry, even if they had the correct sharpness before.
We implemented this because of all the complaints that “my photos look so much better on Flickr”. But I’ll consider the commenters’ arguments and implement something different over the weekend.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Hi , I did not mean an “upsize from you”, I meant, if someone has images he/she has upsized before uploading in a way (might call this unprofessional).
But anyhow - I guess it can be a good thing for the overview pages of photos, because this is your downsizing algorithm anyhow, so users have no influence on that. So if you can optimize it, why not? It just should only adobt the look of the original, and not more.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
I agree, don’t do anything to the uploaded photos. Add an option, sure, but please don’t do it automatically.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
unsharp masking is better.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
Yeah, I prefer to opt out of this processing. I spend a lot of time getting my photos ready for the web, and apply what I consider nice sharpening values already.
Perhaps this can be a button or setting? I know some folks who might want to print my photos right from 23, and giving them the “sharpen image for printing” option would be fine. But as it stands all my photos will be over-sharpened.
January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
This has nothing to do with printing, as we don’t sharpen the original size image which would be best suitable for printing. This is an effort to make the downsized (resized) photos look slightly better because the resizing process itself introduces some blur.
However, in light of comments here, we will probably make this a user setting in the near future. As it stands users don’t really have much control over the standard/original formats since the resizing is done server side — for example you might be dissatisfied with the resizing algorithm we use. (ImageMagick has a resizing parameter called
-supportwhich achieves the same as a sharpening, but without invoking the “sharp” or “unsharp” words at all.) We’ll try to make these available as settings to the extent it’s feasible.January 1st, 1970 at 12:00 am
i guess i understand it right. sharpening the server-downsized images makes sense for me. this also would go for the thumbs in overview…
as long as everyone has it’s originals still original i think this is a good thing