I finally found the missing link!

Usually I don't post this late but I'm just really excited. As a lot of you know I've been experimenting with new workflow lately. While the improvements I've implemented have been a big help, I've noticed that in some of my night photos and car photos there is still something wrong when I resize them for the web. 

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about resizing techniques. There are several ways that images can be resized. One way is nearest neighboor. In this resizing technique the program simply drops out the other pixels. This is probably the fastest way for a computer to resize a photo, but it is also the roughest. Bilinear is a better method where the program averages the pixels, then removes the redundant ones. This takes more computing power, but yeilds much better results. The best way to resize images is using a Bicubic method. This uses a more complex algorithm to resize the image, which takes more time but yeilds some great results. With modern computers there is no reason not to use a Bicubic resizing method. 

So what does all this have to do with anything? Well I was using a program that didn't really specify what type of method it was using to resize the pictures. My best guess is that it was using a Bilinear method. This looked good for most pictures but I noticed, especially in my last series, that it was creating some weird artifacts that are not present in the full sized images. 

Since photoshop continues to be a pain with batch resizing, watermarking, and sharpening, I started to look on the internet for some suggestions. I came across a post on a forum in which a photographer recommended using a program called Photoscape for batch processing. It was also free so I figured I better give it a shot. Wow! I've been looking for a program like this for months! I've never seen a free program that combines the complex bicubic sharpening method, a multitude of filters, and batch watermarking. Go check it out!

Anyways enough rambling, this is a photoblog after all! Here is an example of what I'm talking about.

Resizing With Bilinear Method (Using Old Watermark Utility), JPG Quality 100%


Resizing With Bicubic Method (Using Photoscape), JPG Quality 100%


Resizing With Bicubic Method (Using Photoscape), JPG Quality 95%


Wow! Look at the difference between the first and second image! I don't know about your eyes but to me the lines look a lot smoother and there is more natural detail in the image. It doesn't look oversharpened and retains a realistic look. Bicubic resizing also seems to be much less sensitive to JPG compression as well. I can't tell a difference between 100% and 95% quality, even though the later is half the file size. Photoscape also seems to handle alpha layers much better as well, look how much better the watermark looks in the 2nd and 3rd pictures.

Here is one more example:


Bilinear Method, 100% Quality JPG


Bicubic Method, 95% Quality JPG



Bilinear Method, 100% Quality


Bicubic Method, 95% Quality

You might not be able to see it but there is also a slight improvement in color rendition with Bicubic as well. This example shows it pretty drastically:




Bilinear Method, 100% Quality


Bicubic Method, 95% Quality

I always thought it was compression that was causing the issues. After all this I was just using the wrong type of resizing method. It just didn't fit well with my workflow to have to do each image individually in photoshop. I'm really glad a found a free, powerful utility to handle this. Thumbs up Photoscape! Now I can get back to the important stuff, like photography! But first I need some sleep...