Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2013

Facebook "High Quality" Image Upload

I recently uploaded some holiday snaps to Facebook for everyone to have a look at, and noticed something a bit amiss. I made sure to check the "High quality" checkbox. I made sure I exported the image at a size suitable for Facebook without it having to be resized. And yet the amount of noise added by Facebook's "high quality" image algorithms to produce exactly the same image is mind-boggling. This is the original, weighing in at 102KB: And this is the one Facebook delivers to viewers, weighing in at 40KB: Can you tell the difference? Even when zoomed in? No? Well, I can, because I'm a persnickety perfectionist. And so I did an experiment. Taking each image, overlaying one on top of the other and using a "difference" filter, I produced an image detailing the places where the images differ. Quite a lot of noise considering it's supposed to be delivering high quality images. But wait, there's more. If I use the Levels slider

Road to Wortley

The sun was out for the first time in living memory, so I went for a short walk up the Wortley road off the A61. The sky was very blue, and the grass was very green. The light was spectacular, the colours of the mid-day sun with the saturation of the golden hour. See the full set in the Road to Wortley gallery.